The Chosen

by Edward Lee

“Good, fatboy, good. You’re learning. Now, finish up whatever fucking around you’ve got in there, and then waddle your fat ass over to my dishwasher and get on the stick. If you’re too fat to squeeze through the door, let me know. I’ll run a buscart into your fat ass and pop you in.”

  I don’t have to take this shit from him, do I? Lee asked himself, then paused. Yeah, I guess I do. He’s a manager, and he just caught me drinking on duty. I didn’t come all this way to get canned on my first night on the job. “I’ll be over in ten,” he said.

  “Make it five,” Kyle corrected. “And turn off that redneck boom box unless you want me to bust it over your fat head.”

  Lee didn’t know how much more of this guy he could take. Kyle retreated back into the RS kitchen. When Lee turned off the boom box, he could hear Kyle yelling at someone back there. “You fuckin’ groaty bitch, what the fuck you doin’ in there!” Lee just shook his head and got to mopping behind the hotline. Boy, I just love working with nice guys like him, he thought.

  Then he thought, you’ve got to be shitting me! when he went through the door into the room-service kitchen. He didn’t see Kyle, but he did see one holy hell of a mess. Dishes stacked up till next Easter! I’ll be here all night! And that line Kyle had given him about his dish-man being ragged out? What a load of shit. There’d been no dishman on duty over here at all; the machine wasn’t even turned on; the temp gauge read 50 degrees. They’d done a whole night’s worth of room service orders and hadn’t cleaned a fucking thing!

  Boy, am I getting screwed, Lee thought, and lit the Hobart’s pilot. If he thinks I’m gonna clean his dishes every goddamn night, he’s got another thing coming. This was an outrage. There was junk all over the floor, broken plates, food, trash. And if the mountain of dirty plates wasn’t enough, the entire cold line counter was stacked with racks of dirty glasses. “Hey, Kyle!” Lee called out. “I’m not a goddamn machine! What are you trying to pull?”

  No response. Where the hell did he go? Lee cranked the heat knob on the Hobart to high, then looked around. Along the aisle wall to the room-service elevators stood the tall steel doors to Kyle’s walk-ins and pantries. There were all locked.

  Except for one.

  Lee pushed his long hair back off his brow and approached the one door that stood partway open. As he neared, he heard something, a fierce slapping sound.

  Slapping?

  He peeked in. Stared.

  It was a storage room. Another door at the end was closed. And the sound he heard was slapping, all right. Lee couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

  One of the room-service staff—the short, fat, doughy woman Lee had seen around—was hunkered down in the corner against several one-hundred-pound sacks of rice. One quarter of a club sandwich lay in pieces on the floor. And towering above was Kyle, his hand a hot blur. He was slapping the living shit out of the woman…

  “Fuckin’ fat retard bitch,” Kyle murmured, slapping away at the woman’s face. “How many times I gotta tell you dolts to stay the fuck outa here, huh?” Slap-slap-slap! “Next time I catch you in here I’m gonna bust you up good.” Slap-slap-slap!

  Lee was too shocked at first to even react. Tears streaked the woman’s wide, reddened face. Kyle laid his open palm twice more across the side of her head, and she recoiled, whining. “Gonna fuck with me, huh?” Kyle remarked. He roughly grabbed her by the ear, hauled her up, and drew back his fist—

  “Cut it out, man!” Lee yelled.

  Kyle’s fist froze. He glanced over his shoulder. In the pause, the woman, sobbing, crawled out of the corner and scurried away.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Lee demanded.

  Kyle turned, glaring. “None of your fuckin’ business, fatboy. I thought I told you to get this joint cleaned up.”

  “You can’t be treating people like that, man. You’ve got to be out of your mind.”

  “She’s a fuckin’ thief,” Kyle countered, “just like all the dolts around here. You don’t slap ’em around every now and then and they’ll steal you blind. I caught the pig ripping off food.”

  Lee went agape, pointing to the bits of club sandwich. “You’re beating the shit out of her for stealing toast points? All she’s gotta do is file a complaint with the labor board and your ass is grass, man.”

  Kyle ushered him out of the pantry, closed the door, and put a padlock on it. “She won’t say shit, fatboy. Wanna know why? ‘Cause she’s illegal. She says anything to anyone, and she gets deported.”

  “Yeah?” Lee gestured. “Well you can’t deport me.”

  Kyle leaned against a trans cart and chuckled. “Who’re you kidding? I been working with guys like you for ten years, and you’re all the same. You got no life except for this. Shit, fatboy, this is the most money you’ll ever make, and you know it. You fuck with me, and I’ll fire your ass faster than it takes me to shake the piss off my dick, and then you’ll have nothing. You wanna go back to the city where you’ll have to pay rent on half the money you make with Feldspar?”

  Lee didn’t answer.

  “I thought so. Learn quick, fatboy. Around here you don’t fuck with the system”—then Kyle pointed—“and you don’t fuck with me. And anytime you see me wailing on these pig-ugly dolts, you keep your mouth shut, otherwise you don’t get that raise.”

  “What raise?”

  “The raise I’m putting you in for tonight, for ‘exceptional performance and high attitudinal standards.’ Get it?”

  I get it, all right, Lee thought. You’re greasing me.

  Kyle grinned around the RS kitchen. “Yeah, looks to me like if you bust that wide-load tail of yours you might be out of here by six in the morning. Me, I think I’ll go viddie some tit flicks and have a few beers. Better get on the stick, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Lee replied, but many other, better replies came to mind just then. Kyle swaggered off, leaving Lee to the landslide of dirty dishes and chock-full garbage cans. Good Christ, he thought.

  “Hey, fatboy,” Kyle called out from his service cage. “Catch.”

  Lee flinched and caught the bottle of EKU Maibock that Kyle tossed him. “You’re real generous, man,” he said.

  Kyle laughed out loud. “Damn right, and if this floor ain’t clean enough for me to eat off of by morning, I’ll shove the empty bottle up your fat ass. Have a good one, buddy!”

  Kyle’s laughter disappeared when he went up the room-service elevator. All Lee could think was you motherless motherfucker as he turned on the Hobart’s chain motor and began spraying off the first rack of food-smudged dishes, the first of many.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Donna supposed they must seem the oddest couple. Dan B. was big, brusk, brazen-mouthed—he sometimes took things too seriously—while Donna cast an opposite appearance: fawnish, sometimes flighty. Perhaps it was this very contrast that held them so securely together. Donna didn’t really care about the whys and wherefores. All that mattered was that they loved each other.

  Making it hadn’t been easy for the two of them—they had their dreams much as any couple did. But it was difficult to pursue a dream beyond life’s often brutal realities. She’d done a lot of low things in her life, back in the Bad Old Days, many of which she’d never even told Dan B. How could she? What man would want her? She hadn’t had a drink in over six months; the most she’d ever gone before that was six days. It was Dan B. who had pulled her out. He never gave up on her, where most guys gave up the first week, or night. Yet Dan B. was the only one who’d cared enough about her to keep her from faltering. Many of the men before him actually encouraged her to drink. It made me an easy fuck, she realized now, in the tense dark. Sometimes she cried just thinking about it, and about how ugly the world could be.

  She’d boozed herself right out of college. Ten years ago? she wondered. Twelve? She’d spent the next decade throwing darts at a map of the country. Each new city, and its promise of a new start, spat her back out like used gum. How many towns had
she been run out of? How many times had she made her name mud? Oh, God. From Akron to Tucson, Seattle to Baltimore, the one thing she could never escape was herself. She’d been fired from so many jobs that soon she’d run out of cities. Dark days. Each night after work she spent all her tips in the bars, and when she spent all her tips…

  The memory made her sick. Alcoholism stripped her of her humanity. It was a common occurrence to flirt for drinks, but quite a few guys out there knew that scene. Often she’d do more than flirt. One night she tallied up a fifty-dollar tab in Fells Point, and she was broke. She wound up blowing a guy in the toilet stall to cover it. Another time, in Massachusetts, she’d been thrown out of some gin joint for coming on to customers. Trudging home, she passed out on the street. When she woke up she was in the back seat of a Delta 88 being gang-raped by three chuckling men. It went on for hours and she scarcely even knew it, she was so drunk. Later, they kicked her out of the car, half-naked, bleeding, with semen in her hair, and all she could think to say before they drove off was “Give me some money for a bottle and you can do it again.” The driver got out, kicked her in the head, and pissed on her…

  Yeah, she thought now. The Bad Old Days. How much worse could they have been? She was barely holding down a barmaid job at The Rocks when she met Dan B. He’d just come up from Charleston after the four-star restaurant he was chefing at folded from financial problems, and now he was working at The Emerald Room. He didn’t have to date her long to realize she had a problem; he was carrying her out of bars right and left, but the thing that didn’t jibe was he kept coming back.

  That had never happened before—it almost shocked her. “You’re a sucker to want to have anything to do with me,” she told him one night after tying on a giant one at Middleton’s Tavern. “I’m an alcoholic.”

  “If that’s what you think,” he shouted in her face, “then that’s all you’ll ever be!”

  She got fired from The Rocks for being drunk on duty. When she told Dan B., she expected him to dump her. Instead, he stuffed her in the car and took her to an AA meeting. Three times a week he took her. When she pitched a fit, he made her go anyway, often forcing her into the car. “I don’t want to go!” she’d yell. “I don’t give a shit what you want!” he’d yell back. “I’m not going to sit around and watch you kill yourself! Either you go on your own, or I drag you in and handcuff you to the fucking chair!”

  Why did he put up with her? He even dropped a shift to take her to the meetings. Sometimes she’d actually hide, but he’d find her anyway. Once she’d skipped out to the City Dock, was about to walk into O’Brien’s for a gin and tonic, when Dan B.’s dusty station wagon pulled up at the corner. “It’s time for your AA, Donna,” he said through the window. “Get in the car.”

  The meetings depressed her—that’s why she initially didn’t like to go. A room full of people just like her, all telling the same grim stories. But eventually it sank in. It reassured her to know that she was not the only person in the world who’d done desperate things for a drink. Alcoholism, she learned, was a genetically founded disease, not just a failure of willpower. Some people could drink with no problem, others could have just one and that was their ruin. Dan B. sat through the meetings with her, which must have been particularly grueling, for he barely drank at all. Two beers was it for him. Yet he insisted on being there with her every time. One night she’d asked him. “Why do you do all this for me?”

  “Because I love you,” he said. “Why do you think?”

  It was an alien word to her, and one that had never been spoken to her by any man. Love—real love—was not something that happened to drunks. Then one day it dawned on her that she’d not had a drink in almost a month…

  Dan B. had given her back what a horrible circumstance had stolen from her: her life.

  A month later they got married.

  ««—»»

  Which left them to their dreams. But what were they? Donna had gotten more out of the deal than she’d ever imagined; she’d gotten the chance to live again. She could scarcely think beyond that. But what of Dan B.? He’d been saving for years, in hopes to one day own his own place. The money he could bank from The Inn could make his dream real, yet he’d been reluctant to move. “If we move, you won’t be able to go to your AA meetings anymore,” he’d revealed his only worry. Again, it was her, it was Donna that was his only concern. “You’re all the AA I need now,” she’d assured him. She’d been the one to insist they take the new positions that Vera had arranged, not that she was too keen on living in the sticks, but because it provided her the opportunity, finally, do give something back to Dan B., to do something for him. The extra money they both made would give Dan B. his own restaurant that much sooner.

  He slept beside her now, snoring softly in the big, plush bed. Donna felt blissful, sedate; they’d made slow love earlier. His semen still trickled in her; it reminded her of a gift, or a verifier of sorts. One day, when their other dreams came true, she’d give him a baby…

  Suddenly, she shuddered beneath the covers, like a jag of vertigo. She groaned. A bad memory swung before her mind, an unwelcome image from the Bad Old Days. It was an anonymous poem: The past is as present as the truth is a lie, all this time you think you’re living, then one day you wake up and die. What an awful poem, and an awful recollection. The poem had always stuck in her head for some reason, perhaps to remind her to never take things for granted. It was from years ago. Donna had been blowing some cowboy in the men’s room of a bar in San Angelo, Texas. He’d left her sitting there with a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. She’d spat his sperm into the toilet, and then she looked up and seen the poem amid phone numbers and expletives. It had been written on the stall door in magic marker.

  Why should such a memory resurface now? Things were good now, and the Bad Old Days were in the past. The past is as present, she thought, as the truth is a lie… What did it mean?

  Suddenly the bedroom’s warm and cozy dark felt full of unseen ghosts. A tear drooled out of her eye, and she turned to hug Dan B. Ghosts, she thought. The memory was one of her past’s many demons, coming back for a little haunt…

  Donna could live with that, she’d have to. Forget it, she thought. Goddamn the poet, though, and that funk-crotch cowboy slime who’d known just the right way to take advantage of her. “Say, honey, you say you’re twenty short on your tab? Well, I can think of way to clear that up a might fast.” Fuck you. He was probably in the same bar right now, pulling that same ploy. Yeah, she considered now. I guess everybody’s got their ghosts…

  Ghosts.

  The thought transgressed. It reminded her of the book she’d picked up at the mall a few days before they left town. When The Inn had been a sanitarium, the doctors and staff had taken some grim liberties with the patients.

  After the investigation in the late thirties, hundreds of charges had been filed by the state: rape and sexual abuse, torture, murder. It had gone on for years. Donna couldn’t imagine the sheer horror that had occurred within these same walls. Hence The Inn’s reputation for being haunted, a reputation so notorious that local residents had set fire to the building. Many claimed they’d seen ghosts.

  Ghosts, she thought.

  Vera dismissed the book’s revelations as fantasy, but Donna, of late, wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t been sleeping well recently. Often she’d wake at night convinced someone was in the room, or standing just outside the door. Into the wee hours, she could hear the doors of the room-service elevators opening and closing downstairs, but it was strange that she’d never hear the elevators themselves traveling up and down from the RS kitchen to the upper suites. There were other sounds too, more distant sounds, like footsteps, faraway muttering, and something that sounded like a shriek. And tonight, when The Carriage House had closed, she came upstairs to shower before bed and had been absolutely irked by the impression that someone was watching her.

  But what bothered her most of all was the dream.

  It made lit
tle sense, and wasn’t particularly harrowing. Yet she’d had it every night now since they’d moved to The Inn.

  She’d dream of herself walking dim, dank corridors, dressed only in her sheerest lingerie. She felt intoxicated and aroused, as if in a trance. As if someone were summoning her.

  Someone, or something.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Vera descended the stairs the next morning at ten, wearing a lightly flowered chartreuse jacket and white chiffon skirt. A bleached stone statue of Edward the Confessor smirked at her on the landing when she evened the jacket’s low-cut brim.

  She’d slept in snatches, dragged in and out of sleep. The dream of The Hands had mauled her all night, plied her, twisted her into the lewdest positions. She’d waked just before dawn in a gloss of perspiration, having kicked off the bedcovers in her sleep. One pillowcase was torn, she’d noticed, by her teeth. I’m so horny I’m having sex-fits, she’d thought. Her sweat dampened the sheets beneath her. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t return to sleep, tossing and turning instead.

  More and more now, The Inn’s resistance to light occurred to her. Little sunlight fell into the atrium this morning, leaving only quiet gloom. She went behind the reception desk and down the left hall, to the front office. Feldspar looked up from his desk and semi-smiled when she entered.

  “Good morning, Ms. Abbot.”

  “Hi, Mr. Feldspar,” she replied. “You’re a pretty hard guy to track down.”

  “Indeed.” He set his Mont Blanc down on the blotter and stiffly rose. “I apologize for not being present for your opening night—I was horribly detained writing promotional copy for our new membership brochures. I understand your first night went well.”

  No one had to go to the hospital with food poisoning, she thought, if that’s what you mean by well. “We only did fifteen dinners.”