by Steve Toltz
So what did the job entail?
I had to wait in the kitchen, shivering in subarctic air conditioning, scrubbing plates and shining counters while the chef prepared the food simulacrum, after which I pushed carts through poorly lit corridors into rooms where I was to cultivate a disgust at human sexuality I’ll never entirely shake off, delivering overcooked meat on soggy bread under silver domes to bargain-obsessed adults who dressed like rich ten-year-olds and didn’t stop sniffing cocaine off strippers’ tits when I entered. That, and the overabundance of women who when talking to their dogs referred to themselves as “mummy,” and the Sri Lankan concierge who whined about the day globalization finally reached his village but passed him by personally, and the guests who stared at me meaninglessly as if I were a potted plant or a fixed point in space, and the businessmen loitering, frustrated and embarrassed outside their rooms, unable to master the electronic key, made me hate every minute, but because a stubborn illogical part of me wanted to impress and win Stella back, I was determined to stick it out, and I would have, if not for, you know.
No, I don’t know. What?
What. Exactly.
What?
Exactly. Until my species of bad luck is identified, I can’t say.
CAN’T SAY WHAT?
I know I’m always in the path of strange comets, and it’s somehow my own fault, but how, Liam? Am I really reaping what I sowed? If so, what the fuck am I sowing, and how am I sowing it?
That I don’t know.
Some nights, when I go to bed, I half-expect to find on my pillow a card that reads, “Yours sincerely, Lucifer.”
Aldo, just tell me, what happened at the Railway Hotel?
Nothing much! That’s the thing! Everything happened. The usual. In the nine measly days of my employment there, I slipped on the lobby floor, only to be harshly reprimanded by Uncle Howard for slipping on a slip-resistant surface. I misidentified the sex of a guest’s child in front of the hotel owner, fell up the back staircase, opened the side restaurant door and struck a pensioner in the face, and then the solemn feud between me and staircases extended to elevators when, somewhere between the third and fourth floors, the elevator ground to a shuddering halt.
You got stuck in the elevator? Is that such a major deal?
The problem was I wasn’t alone. There was an attractive blonde in a leather skirt with a few more teeth than her mouth could handle who pressed the button a dozen times, and it occurred to me, I mean I sensed, that to be trapped in an elevator with a man was the erotic fantasy she’d waited her whole life for, and further, I intuited that she wanted to want me, but there wasn’t the slightest hint of sexual tension between us and despite herself she couldn’t or wouldn’t find me attractive. “This is a bit of bad luck,” I said. “Hmm,” she said back. I said, “All those disaster movies have it wrong. I don’t think strangers do bond together in times of crisis, I think they resent each other’s unfamiliarity as the plane goes down and then burn together in awkward silence.”
Funny.
Right? In response, she pushed herself into the elevator’s corner and began whimpering, and a second thing occurred to me: She’s scared out of her mind! I gave my warmest smile aimed precisely at her absurd misperception. “Don’t touch me,” she said, and backed up even further. “I’ll scream!” she screamed, incrementally flattening herself against the polished wall, then half-turning sideways into a cowered squat. I didn’t know what to do; I straightened my rumpled shirt and put on my most solicitous grin and stared ahead at the doors, but they were reflective burnished silver, and no matter which way I turned we couldn’t avoid each other’s images. It was awful. Her terror, my terror of her terror. Her mounting hysteria, my anger at her refusal to calm the fuck down. And the whole thing just triggered the worst memories.
Of what?
You remember.
Natasha Hunt?
Exactly. I mean, is sexual insidiousness my blind spot? Do I spur a reflex to persecute? Is there such a glitch in my aura that I project myself as wild and undomesticated? Is that the family curse, that we make bad first impressions, middle impressions, and last impressions?
Let’s get back to the elevator.
Twenty grueling minutes later, the doors fly open and the petrified woman sprints out, and within an hour I’m summoned by Howard into his office, a large room with a wall of huge windows in factory frames—so this is where all the light was, I thought; he was hoarding it, the bastard. “Stella’s like a daughter to me,” he said, “so what should I do about this complaint?” I said, “I never touched that guest!” He said, “She’s not a guest.” I asked, “So she works in the hotel?” He said, “Not exactly.” I couldn’t understand the meaning of this conversation. Howard worked the back of his neck in a pincer squeeze. “She’s a working girl,” he explained, using that strangely old-fashioned term, and went on to explain that she came from a high-class brothel, The Enigma Variations. “The Enigma Variations?” I said. “What kind of a name for a brothel is that?” “Just leave the girls alone, Aldo. They have a job to do,” he said, and so, over the following days, I set out to pick the prostitutes from the regular guests and found it inconceivably easy: heavily madeup girls in drastic skirts trudging noisily down corridors in dagger-like heels, black stockings, and visible suspenders, girls who knew how to stare unblinkingly ahead or else looked to be constantly bracing for impact. I observed them, and the male guests who now smelled of shame and body oil, with puzzlement and fear. Any time I heard footsteps I froze; whenever an order came to the kitchen, my hands trembled. Each night I slept uneasily, my dreams laden with premonitions, and at work, wandering the dark hallways like the child of a sun-fearing people, I expected the worst.
Why? What were you afraid of ?
My clairvoyance wasn’t clairvoyance, but a narrative vision. I believed I was getting the hang of fate’s dramatic structure, and that it had in store something unpleasant in relation to these prostitutes from The Enigma Variations.
And did it? Something happened?
Not, it turned out, in relation to the women at all. One night I arrived at room 707 with a plate of chicken fettuccine balanced on the palm of my left hand and knocked on the door with the shame that comes from pushing a product that costs triple its value. A black shoe had the door propped open. I sang out, “Hello?” and “Room service!” and “Knock knock?” and “Should I come in?” and “Here I come!” and I pushed my way in, bracing myself for verbal abuse (guests were always annoyed at your presence in their rooms, as if by bringing them food you somehow cheapened their hunger). Near the open minibar, the curtains were drawn over the thick unopenable windows and a strange, gummy odor made me wince. On the tufted aquamarine carpet, peanut shells and tiny vodka bottles were scattered amongst several soaking wet towels. A chair was tipped over. And then—him!
Who?
A stark-naked middle-aged man hung by the neck from the surprisingly sturdy chromium-plated chandelier.
A suicide!
He ordered room service right before doing it. Fucker. Eternally slumbering broken-necked bastard! Of course I thought about Henry. And his suicide. And how he had also orchestrated to be found by a stranger. Only now I was the stranger.
For the record, the suspect is referring to his father, Henry Benjamin, who hired a housekeeper in order to—
A Portuguese woman named Dulce, who entered the house when Veronica and I were at school and Leila was at an audition. A note from my father was lying on the table. Please clean the upstairs bathroom first. She clomped upstairs and found Henry dead in the bath with his wrists slit. “Usually the method of teenage girls,” and, “An unmanly suicide,” I later overheard his brothers whisper at his wake, but the overall consensus was that one has to respect a man unwilling to burden his family with the memory of having found his body.
Especially considerate if one discounts poor Dulce.
She came to the door a week after the funeral shaking and pouring sweat. “I
was never paid for my day of work,” she said. Leila answered, “Well, you didn’t actually clean anything.”
Hence Aldo’s expression for whenever he is walking slowly into what he perceives to be a bad situation. He calls it walking like a Portuguese housekeeper.
Your superiors won’t get it.
So, the suicide in the hotel . . .
I looked for a note. There wasn’t one. Only a breakfast card filled out for the following morning: OJ, decaffeinated coffee, continental breakfast basket. I sat down on the bed and tried not to look at the dead man whose expression recalled an umbrella blown open by the wind. From his combination-lock leather attaché and smooth black shoes and neatly folded double-breasted suit I deduced this suicide case had had a business implosion, probably lost the family home, couldn’t face his wife and kids. The body twisted on the curtain cord and his sad sightless visage was angled mercifully away from me. I sat at the desk and wrote a note for him on hotel stationery and left it under a puddle of yellow lamplight: Dear World, I wrote, please have my body placed in a giant clamshell and lowered to the sea floor.
I read about that in the paper!
Liam, I’m telling you, this was a game-changer. Besides feeling upset and horrified, I was overwhelmingly envious; this motherfucker had achieved something that I, who only ever wanted to vanish or dissolve by an act of will or to liquefy in my sleep or disintegrate body and soul, and who occasionally on dark nights toyed with fantasies of autoerotic asphyxiation, had not. It was at that moment I knew I would not quit the Railway Hotel, not in any verbal or written sense, but that I would never turn up again. More significantly, I knew I was done and dusted with it.
Done and dusted with what?
You know how, when I was younger, I wanted to live at least as long as an Antarctic sponge?
Fifteen hundred years.
It’s not just baby Ruby’s death and the divorce and losing friends and the business failures and suffocating debt, it’s the little things: the abscessed tooth that only presents itself while you’re camping, the snakebite when out of cellular range. Listen. I don’t know if you know this, but my mother’s father died after he was bitten by a nonvenomous spider—he died of fright. My mother’s mother was killed by a misdiagnosis of cancer, suggesting a genetic strain of suggestibility off the fucking charts. You know how Jung said the fear of being eaten and the fear of the dark are in the collective unconscious? Well, I come from a very specific line that passed on very specific fears from generation to generation: fear of unraveling rope bridges, fear of causing an avalanche by sneezing, fear of accidentally procreating with a half sister, fear of being shot in the face by a hunter—
Leila’s island.
What about it?
I know you too well. You’re about to talk about Leila’s island again.
They haven’t heard it.
It’s not relevant.
It might be.
It’s not though.
I’m going to say it.
I’ll say it quicker. For the record, Aldo’s mother, Leila, and her family came from a small Pacific island, the name of which Aldo refuses to utter aloud because he promised himself that once it had been totally submerged he’d forget it for all time. When Aldo was thirteen years old, the highest peak of its tallest mountain was swallowed by the sea; Aldo’s father Henry chartered a private twelve-seater and flew him and his mother and his sister over Leila’s homeland for the last time. There. That’s it.
No, that’s not it. The plane schlepping us across the gleaming Pacific was terrifyingly small, the main cabin had patterned curtains on the oval windows and smelled of new carpet and salted peanuts. There was dog hair on the seat. I asked to see the pilot’s license and was upset he couldn’t produce it. To everyone’s laughter, I pulled out of my Adidas sports bag an unused World War II parachute and my nana’s spare oxygen tank, and thirty minutes into the flight, the plane begun to shudder, and they laughed even harder when I put the mask over my face, as if they didn’t notice the building rhythm of the sudden drops. Both Veronica and Henry were frozen upright in their seats, and I remember wishing I was in the plane alone. I imagined the crash and resented the presence of Veronica—who I had fallen out with permanently the day she hit puberty. Ever since, we’d argued constantly, slapped nicotine patches on each other while we slept, etcetera, and I decided it would be irksome to die with her. There was a moment when the plane cruised as if on a current of air. “That’s it! That’s it!” Leila screamed. I closed my eyes, not from fear, but because Henry’s gift to Leila of witnessing the vanishing of her homeland as it vanishes seemed such an outlandish privilege that I was determined not to experience it. Leila cried out, “Aldo, please look out the window.” I looked. The sun had dipped behind low moist clouds and there, veiled in a light rain, was the land that sprang out of my mother’s dreams—a barely visible, pitiful, water-bound peak surrounded by a colossal turquoise sea. The tip of an island so minuscule it seemed impossible that any human civilization once resided there. This was the image she would brood on until her final breath. “It’s sad, but nothing more,” I said, as the early moon floated above the vast calm that enveloped the doomed island. I wasn’t saying that it wasn’t sad. The pilot had turned the plane to make a second pass when there was an eerie, discomforting quiet, a faint acrid smell and a haze of flickering smoke, and the dim luminosity of silver sparks hitting the windscreen; the plane labored and reverberated and then dropped, and we went into a steep descent. It was as if I were levitating in my seat; there was enormous pressure in my eardrums and everyone screamed and, a moment later, lost consciousness, their heads slumped on their chests. All except me, sucking on my nana’s oxygen, my face crushed against the window. The pilot managed to get the plane under control but was flying radically low, and I saw through that oval window an image that penetrated my subconscious with such force I can still feel its moment of entry: the water rising up like blue flames and utterly submerging the drenched peak. That was it: the whole nation slipped away in broad daylight. I was a spectator with no real business seeing what I was seeing. How many generations had lived and died here! I was a solitary pair of eyes, and maybe the ghosts of that nation, unfortunate spirits with nobody to haunt for miles around, attached themselves to me, a diffident eyewitness unwittingly administering a nation’s last rites, because it was just after this incident that life turned to shit. Veronica in the bus explosion, and, the year before that, Henry breaking his shoulder in a fall down a flight of stairs. In hospital he contracted an infection at the surgical site, necrotizing fasciitis that led to septic shock and forced him into and out of surgery, and into the chronic pain that, I believe, led to his suicide. The one he orchestrated for a stranger to find, just as I had been conscripted to do in the Railway Hotel.
And we’re back. Thank God. So in response, you come to the decision to once and for all kill yourself.
I know I mocked the happy couple at their wedding, but at least the Buddhists know what a bummer being born is. And the future! I mean, do I want to be an entrepreneur in a world with an aging population in which the biggest growth market will be human kidneys? Do I want to strain my lifespan just to witness the intergenerational conflicts and water wars of the mid-twenty-first century? In any case, I was sick to death of cognitive function. I thought: You can only cure a fear of dying by dying. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt relief—early onset oblivion, I suppose—and took in the inexhaustible hum of the relentless hallway air-con, the smell of the chicken fettuccine blended with the stench of our dead hero’s final evacuations. I looked out the south-facing windows as though in a narcotic stupor and gazed at the squashed rectangle of empty blue and remembered how, when our little dead girl was born, I stupidly tried to console Stella by swearing we’d saved her a lifetime of heartache and pain. Now I turned back to the swinging body and strained to see the rising coils of his human soul—there were none—and I had an epiphany. Two things needed to happen before I could end my o
wn life: One, I could not allow my mother to outlive me, and two, I needed to see that Stella and her new child were OK. Therefore I needed Leila to die, and I needed Stella to give birth.
You needed to see the baby and the corpse.
I even knew how I’d do it, the exact method.
Not hanging!
Please. I’d break into a hospital morgue and lay myself inside one of those terrifying metal drawers and take an overdose of sleeping pills and then slide myself into the wall.
Not bad.
Not bad? An irreproachably considerate death, you fuck.
So that explains why you were at the hospital once Stella gave birth. But you said you needed your mother to die before you did it.
That’s right.
So you changed your mind about that.
No, I didn’t.
Wait a minute.
Yes.
Aldo.
So that happened.
I think I’m going to cry.
Why not? I did.
Leila died?
A month ago.
YOU DIDN’T CALL ME!
I seem to remember a certain somebody who’d had a gutful of a certain somebody else’s toxic influence.
I would’ve helped you.
Do what?
I don’t know. Organize the funeral?
Eh. Took me all of twenty minutes. Because I couldn’t bear sitting in some office with the inevitable funereal muzak and the consoling tone of the funeral director, I did the whole thing online with a few clicks; picked the day, the coffin, the flowers, the music, entered the address to pick up the body, another to send the death certificate, and after I’d completed the satisfaction survey, it was all organized. It was held in a building on Cleveland Street; the casket I’d chosen, a highly polished rosewood with full trim, had enough nicks and chips to suggest it was a showroom model, and above it was a blown-up headshot of Leila in her late twenties or early thirties—in any case, taken way before her gizzard-smelling later years. I stood inside the door misremembering several old family friends, citing “face blindness,” while every one of them shook my hand in condolence, but since I associate handshakes with congratulations, I had to resist the impulse to lop off each proffered hand at the wrist. In addition, most were people I owed money to or who downright blamed me for precipitating my mother’s death. Not that there was an abundance of mourners. I’d rejected the idea of a standard obituary notice. I mean, why alert grave robbers?