by Paula Guran
I almost had to grin in thanks.
“I could use a drink,” I told him.
He smiled, stepped across to hold the door open for me, and said, “It’s good you chose this night. Tomorrow, there’s a conference on . . . criminal behavior, I think it is.”
“A conference?” I asked, just because it was my slot to fill in our little game of charades.
“Police,” the clerk hissed, then pulled the door shut.
Standing on the sidewalk, I smiled, my face suddenly warm in spite of the night air.
Of course.
I needed the most reliable set of sources possible for my experiment. The most no-nonsense, the least prone to invention.
The Policeman’s Ball it was.
Three weeks later, I rented a room at the hotel designated for next law enforcement officer’s meeting I’d been able to find.
I told Julia it was research. Then, after she left for the restaurant, I withdrew her savings, promising myself to pay her back ten-fold, to deliver her into a life she’d never even guessed at.
Provided she didn’t check her balance, press charges.
The conference, as it turned out, was surprisingly easy to infiltrate. I’d assumed law enforcement personnel would have better screening in place, but all I had to do, finally, was ask at lost and found for the convention badge I’d lost, then select the male-named one from the two the desk clerk provided.
After that, I simply camped out in my room Friday and Saturday nights. I couldn’t risk sitting in on a talk or a panel, and having someone call me by the name on my lanyard.
Sunday morning, however, I emerged. Not crisp and ironed, as if new-minted, but just as rumpled and ready to go home as the rest of the crowd.
Then I simply requisitioned one of the abandoned tables in the exhibit room and put up the least explanatory of handmade signs: SKETCH ARTIST?
On my table, I had a pad of drawing paper with the top few sheets ripped off. To prime the pump, as it were.
Slowly, they trickled in.
This wasn’t a sketch artist conference—do those even exist?—but the conference did bill itself as hosting a set of panels especially dealing with facial recognition, so I gambled that departments would have sent whatever sketch artists they had on contract.
I was right.
They weren’t exactly lining up to draw for me, but once word got around about my experiment, and that I was paying forty dollars per—well.
Julia would have been proud, to see her money put to such good use.
And then there was the added draw of competition.
My pitch was that, over the course of the weekend, I’d paid a current parolee to skulk around at the edges, never quite making eye contact or engaging in conversation. But there. Probably only once, so think, remember.
Whichever sketch artist rendered him the best, made him or her the most identifiable—there was going to be a “line-up” during closing ceremonies later this afternoon—would win the three-hundred dollar jackpot.
They didn’t care whether I was trying to prove their craft or discredit it. They just shrugged, looked up and to the right more times than not, and began to sketch.
By two o’clock, I had sixteen sketches.
At which point I put up my “back in five” sign, collected the sketches, and made my exit.
I’d already checked out that morning, so I could go immediately to my car.
The plan was to get back to my room with Julia, distract her as well as I could from the chance of thinking about her savings account, then spend the night appreciating these last few drops of a secondhand life. Because it was all about to change.
In order to not contaminate the data-collection phase, I’d not yet taken the next step in the research.
As it turned out, though, now I couldn’t wait.
That next step, which a lesser scientist would have started with, was to look up as many of the deaths in that hotel as I could, and then search for faces.
I hadn’t done this beforehand as I might then become the “whisperer” to the sketch artists, indicating to them with non-verbal cues that, no, his hair wasn’t that long, his jaw more square, her eyes more vulnerable.
Just on the chance of my influencing the sketches, I’d not even looked at them yet, but had insisted the artists do their work with the tablet facing away from me, then fold their work before selling it to me.
Outside the public library, I patted the sketches there on my passenger seat but resisted again. Told myself it would be better science to collect all the dead faces I could, instead of the five or ten that I thought matched what I’d already seen.
When you’ve been strung up and burned in effigy once, your control parameters the next time out—they can get obsessive, yes.
Whatever helps the experiment, though. That always comes first.
The library finally had to chase me out at closing.
Dime by dime, I’d printed face after face. The first few I’d looked at in an idle way, but two dozen in—the hotel had been in operation for sixty-four years—I’d become an automaton, just click/print, click/print.
With my sheaf of corpses, then, I stumbled out to my car, and finally broke down—as I knew I would—and paged through the sketches, sorting them without meaning to.
Three of the artists had drawn the same man I’d seen over the shoulder of countless news anchors: sunglasses, five o’clock shadow, firm mouth, grim eyes. Perhaps this was the same person of interest they drew every time out, their way of gaming the system. Or maybe criminals actually conformed to a certain appearance, unlikely as that seemed. It wasn’t my province to say.
I was here for other reasons. Deeper reasons.
Twelve of the remaining thirteen had drawn a balding man with an almost comically wide mouth, his eyes vague and directed elsewhere, as if the artists hadn’t quite “made” them, so could only approximate.
I nodded, smiled.
They were trained to pay attention to distinguishing characteristics, which in turn made them sensitive to faces with characteristics that distinguished those faces. Memorable faces.
It didn’t token well for people with wide-set eyes or unfortunate scars, but it did suggest that the more successful criminals could just as easily have been good fits for the FBI: vague, easy-to-forget faces. Nobody special, just part of the background.
This balding man, though—had I seen him, had I left my room and encountered him, I would have remembered him as well.
Under the dim glow of a streetlight, then, at ten minutes till eleven on a Sunday night, I made the discovery of my century: this balding man had died there fourteen years ago. In his sleep.
I let my head fall back and I laughed, and then I looked all around, for someone to share this with.
It was just me, though.
I had figured it out. What no one else had. Sure, two generations ago, boarding-house proprietress Shay Matheson had made intimations in this direction, stabs in the dark, as it were. But this was real, this was verifiable. More, it was repeatable.
That’s always the final test.
The world was going to have to accept me back, now.
I knew where its dead were.
Walking through the lobby of what I was now calling my temporary home—our temporary home—a Jerry Lee Lewis song was coming from the night clerk’s tinny radio. The night clerk was nowhere to be seen.
I stood and listened to it, felt my eyes unfocus, like . . . I don’t know. But something. And then I got it: a paper I’d tried to write in graduate school. Not an article, my major professor assured me, but good as exercise, anyway. And to insulate myself, should I have animal testing issues lobbed my way later in my career.
The paper, which I never completed, as the research wasn’t worth running down, had to do with finding dogs and cats retired from laboratory testing. Just surgical cases, nothing pharmaceutical. The same way police dogs are farmed out, to while away their final years.
&n
bsp; I knew most lab animals were destroyed once they’d served their purpose. But not always.
My idea was to track some of them down, in their dotage. And, if they’d been conditioned on a certain tone of chime, say, to then strike that chime again, and observe the response. The stated concern was muscle memory, more or less. Really, though, I wanted to watch their eyes. Not to see if that chime was conjuring a specific experiment, but to see if they got a wary look, as if the lab were assembling itself around them again.
That was how I felt, standing at the vacant registration desk: like an old dog hearing an old chime—Jerry Lee Lewis. Contemporary of Elvis Presley. The piano player many said should have been Elvis Presley, if not for his much-publicized marriage.
Listening to him, it was just forced déjà vu, then. Like I was standing at the lip of my world, looking over into the next.
I was tired. It had been a full weekend. My body was crashing from all the adrenaline of discovery.
Julia.
I think I actually said her name out loud, and looked up through four ceilings, four floors. Like she could save me from myself, here.
Because I’d stopped taking the stairs since Shay Matheson’s journal, I waited for the elevator, stepped in, and, reliable as ever, it carried me up to my hall.
It was empty. Even the two times I looked behind me.
I tried to laugh at myself, about how stupid I was being.
It was guilt, I knew. A responsible researcher, one who’s not in a movie, anyway, knows the first thing you do when you verify a hypothesis is to document it, and seal that away somewhere. Nothing official, just enough so that, if you leave your lab or your office, step in front of a bus—or into a plunging elevator—then the research can survive you.
That’s what I was feeling: the weight of being the only one, so far, to know.
It made my head light on my shoulders, my steps ponderous, historic.
Perhaps this was what success felt like.
I’d better get used to it, I told myself, and then, rounding the molded-in pillar to 566, I looked down the hall behind me one more time. Just for superstition.
Empty. As I knew it would be.
Some nights, every step is an experiment.
I shook my head, grinned, and went to insert my keycard. Into the already-open door.
It swung back as if from the weight of my unasked questions.
I swallowed loudly, stepped into the doorway. “Julia?” I called, my voice hushed in that token way, as I had to assume she was sleeping. But I also assumed that she would be eager to wake, to see me.
The lights came on when I touched them, proving this wasn’t a horror movie.
The room was as it always was: a sitting area, a kitchen on one wall, the bed against the other.
The bed was made but rumpled, as if someone had laid there.
I touched those wrinkles, touched the edge of the sink as well, as if confirming her absence, and then, nodding to myself, I went back to the door, sure I had the wrong number, had gotten off at the wrong floor.
566.
I shook my head no, tried to play back Julia’s schedule, just came up with six o’clock again. It was when she got home every Sunday, because she’d lied to the headwaiter that she was religious. The kind of religious that likes brunch tips, though, right? I think he’d said. It was all because of a show she liked.
I breathed in, breathed out.
“You should be here,” I told her, and, still shaking my head no, I stepped across, to deposit my files and sketches on the two-person table.
And that was when I saw it.
A carbon of the withdrawal on her savings account. Dated Saturday morning. When the bank was only open for four scant hours, and all the way across town, at that.
But she’d gone there.
And now she wasn’t here.
I wanted to laugh, wanted to cry. Timing, that’s all it was. Soon I was going to shower her with money, with respect, with fame. She’d been investing in our future, I wanted to tell her. She just hadn’t known it. She’d been ensuring the science could continue.
I didn’t know what to do.
Wait until her lunch shift tomorrow, sit at one of her tables? Catch her taking break on the haunted bus tour, start all over again?
I opened the window, telling myself it was to study the city, but I’d read enough studies to know it was either a response to this sense of claustrophobia—opening the window would increase the range of my options, or let me feel like that, anyway—or a result of the way my culture had programmed me: the romantic gestures were ingrained. The city festering below me was supposed to be epic, a big machine I could never stop, my problems just the smallest of cogs.
This is what you do at these moments. You gaze into the distance. You feel sorry for yourself.
And finally, you see yourself in the reflection.
Except, this time, I wasn’t alone.
On the bed behind me, sitting with her back to me, was—
“Jules!” I said, spinning around, and then I felt behind me for the wall, for the table, for a part of the real world I could hold onto: Julia had blond hair. It wasn’t restaurant policy, but it might as well have been.
The woman who had been on my bed, her hair had been spilling down her back like ink in water, like raven feathers, so black it was almost coming back around to blue. And long enough I could have lost my arm in there.
I shook my head no, no.
“You’re dead,” I told her.
I was talking to Mary.
That’s her real name, yes.
I hadn’t looked her up in all the years since, because I knew it would be litany of institutions, of séances that were supposed to fix her, of more and more desperate attempts to finally, please, be alone. I hadn’t looked her up because, in addition to what she’d been burdened with before coming to me, now she was a laughingstock, as well.
I hadn’t looked her up, no, but, in looking up the rest of the dead for my research, my search terms had found her all the same, suicided in a motel room half a country away. Tired of running from whatever had been pursuing her.
Personal demons, I would have said, at the beginning of my career.
When I had a career.
I tried to take a step, to get to the hall, but the muscles of my leg were in revolt, it seemed.
“You’re dead!” I said again, to no one.
I scooped up my research, held it close, and finally managed, keeping constant contact with the kitchen-counter, to scrape and slide my way to the door.
An instant before I eased the door shut, the light went off.
I ran, clutching my papers.
Crashing down the stairs two and three at a time, I shifted the sketches and files in order to keep contact with the handrail, and I remembered the gentlemen I had met coming down the stairs the night of my haunted bus tour, the night I met Julia. How his hand had just been skating along the rail, but never quite touching it.
Because he couldn’t.
Had he placed himself there to witness, though? Had he been a scout of sorts, from the other side, somehow herding me onto that haunted bus? Did they want me to meet Julia?
I fell down the last flight, collected myself, burst out into the lobby, fully expecting it to be standing room only, packed with the dead, there to receive me in their quiet, patient way. To carry me to their god, or feast on what was left of my reason.
The lobby was empty.
I collected myself as best I could, just caught a falling sketch. It was the sixteenth.
I’d initially dismissed it as incomplete, as too vague to be included in the data set.
Now I saw it for what it was: that same balding man, just featureless in a way. No eyes, no mouth.
But an intent, somehow. A grim intent.
I pushed the sketch away, turned to the registration desk.
The clerk, still half-asleep, was studying me. Trying to fit me into his narrative of the night, it
seemed.
“My wife,” I said to him, piling my papers on the desk, struggling to corral them, keep them from becoming the avalanche they wanted to be.
“Your wife,” he said back to me, my prompt to actually complete this question.
“Did she—did she leave a note?” I said, working so hard to control my voice.
“Oh, oh yeah,” he said, narrowing his eyes and looking away. A poker player’s gaze. A gunfighter’s stare.
I reached across, pulled him to me by his shirtfront, so our faces were close enough I could taste the musty sleep on his breath.
“I can tell the manager you were sleeping on the job, you know,” I told him, trying my best to hiss it across.
“No rooms to register, man,” he said, breaking my hold, adopting a tone for a moment that I associated with music videos, with “gangster.” It was his tough persona, that he usually didn’t need for work.
This wasn’t a usual night, though.
“No rooms?” I said, panic creeping all the way into my voice, now.
“Your wife, man, she—she knew we always held one back somehow. I figured what the hell, right? Andrew Jackson speaks with the weight of history . . . ”
“She’s in the Elvis Room?”
“Elvis is in the building?” he said, a smile curling up from the right side of his mouth, his eyes mock-darting to the lobby behind me, for Elvis.
“She’s in that last room?” I said.
“With explicit instructions—”
“Which one,” I said across to him.
When he just gave me that same stare, I slowly, as if showcasing it, pulled out my wallet, and started laying down Julia’s money, twenty by twenty. “Jackson by Jackson,” to him. It made it worse.
At two hundred and forty, all of it, the clerk shrugged.
“Guess she didn’t say anything about not telling you what floor,” he said, pulling the bills across, folding them around his thumb like a Vegas dealer. “Try nine, boss man. Nine might just be your lucky number, tonight.”
“Odd or even?” I said.
“Your lucky numbers tonight won’t be prime . . . ” he said in his best fortune-cookie voice, liking this game so much more than I was. I turned, was already running.