by Sara Davis
Why wasn’t anyone there? I would have thought that this would be the hour for the bar and lounge to be, if not filled to the brim, at least frequented by a few patrons. But not only were there no patrons at all, but the bar gave every sign of having been closed up for the night—the stools had disappeared, and the votive candles that had been burning when I arrived were now extinguished and stacked behind the bar. How odd, I thought. I could not have spent more than—I thought—forty minutes upstairs, at the most, and in that time the bartender had apparently come and gone, and closed up shop?
“Good evening, sir.”
The young man who’d been standing behind the reception desk materialized at my elbow.
In spite of all that I had recently experienced, I had a moment of amused surprise; it was not often that one was addressed with such formality in California.
“Can I help you with something?”
“No,” I said. “Well, I was just wondering why there isn’t anyone here at the bar.”
“It’s closed for the night,” said the young man. “Sorry to disappoint you. Were you expecting someone?”
“No,” I said. I looked over at the bar again, as if it might be able to assist, at the snuffed-out candles, arranged in orderly stacks. “I’m not expecting anyone.
“But it’s only”—and I looked at my watch, as the young man regarded me placidly—“a quarter past nine,” I said. “That seems a little early.”
The young man’s eyebrows rose, ever so slightly, like a pair of clouds moving in the sky. He pulled back his sleeve to look at his own watch. By the expression on his face, what he read there was just as he’d expected.
“Is it possible that your watch has stopped, sir?” He came close to me now, wrist-first, and I could smell the hint of his cologne, something vaguely familiar.
“But,” I said. I felt the situation was passing out of my control. I had a brief and shuddering reprise of the feeling I’d had upstairs in the guest lecturer’s hotel room, of the darkness thickening around me, pressing in—but that, I thought, could not really have happened. I pushed the thought away from me firmly.
“Are you sure that’s the time?” I said.
“Yes,” said the young man smoothly. “I’m sure. The bar closes at eleven.”
“At eleven,” I repeated.
“That’s right,” he said.
We stood there in silence for a moment. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s only that I must have … lost track of time, somehow.”
“Well,” said the young man, smiling, “that, and your watch stopped.”
His features, now that I was seeing them up close, were remarkably smooth and perfect—he was too delicate to be called handsome, but everything looked as though it had been made very carefully, with great attention to detail. What an unusual creature, I thought, remembering his “Good evening, sir”—he was certainly not from around here.
“I hope you had a pleasant stay,” he said. Evidently, he had mistaken me for a hotel guest. “Do you need help with your car?”
“No,” I said. What kind of help would I need? “Thank you, I’ll be fine.”
He stood, watching me, as I walked out of the hotel, and a million different questions suggested themselves. What was that thing in the briefcase, for one? And what could account for that … change in the atmosphere, upstairs? What had happened to the time, or rather, to my watch?
I glanced back over my shoulder at the hotel and saw that the impressively large bellhop had gone to stand by the little front desk man in the entryway. Backlit by the soft glow of the lobby lights, their silhouettes were comically mismatched—the bellhop huge and stoop-shouldered, the dark-haired young man tiny and still. I had the unsettling feeling that they—and perhaps the hotel itself—were watching me go.
It was a relief to be out in the night air, under the quiet sky, and the sudden drop in temperature gave my senses a welcome little shock. It was a relief, too, to have escaped the company of the guest lecturer; the moment in the car when she’d laid her hand on my knee had been particularly difficult. But, I thought, tomorrow she would fly back to Colorado, and I would never encounter her again. The piece of stationery! I thought. But when I felt anxiously in my pocket, I found it was still there.
I was so involved in these disjointed thoughts, flitting in and out of my consciousness like the chirruping of birds, that it was not until I came out from behind a dense bank of oleander that I saw, to my surprise, that tucked behind the windshield wiper of every car in the parking lot was a small orange piece of paper.
I stopped short. It is some kind of advertisement, or notice about parking, I told myself, but when I advanced warily upon my own vehicle, I saw that it was neither of those things, but something else, the half sheet filled with cramped, over-xeroxed handwriting. It was too dark outside to read it properly. I freed it, opened the car door, and flicked on the overhead light. I still had some idea that it was a communication from the hotel, but a moment’s reading disabused me of that. At the top of the page, in block letters, appeared what seemed to be the “title” of the piece—STOP SITES OF GENOCIDE FROM BECOMING TOURIST ATTRACTIONS SHAME on our university for this dirty deal! The wind of freedom blows but for whom, Mr President— I stopped reading there, although it went on, the script growing more crowded and illegible with each line.
On the other side was a map of California in grainy black outline. All along the coast, angry red Xes had been marked. This is an odd piece of paper, I thought, it was not meant for me. I looked toward the entrance of the hotel, and I could see, to my surprise, through the gap in the oleander, that the bellhop and the dark-haired young man were still standing there, framed by the doorway.
From this distance, I told myself, there was a limit to what they could actually see, there must be. The parking lot, I saw with a quick glance, was deserted. With one hand I rolled down the window, and with the other I crumpled the little orange sheet of paper into a ball, then dropped it discreetly to the ground outside. Whatever that was, I thought, some crackpot’s personal crusade, it did not concern me. There was a limit to how many bizarre events a person could take an interest in over the span of one evening.
6
I woke the next morning in my own bed, with the feeling that the explainable world was somehow slipping from my grasp. Bleak, gray morning light filled the room, and faintly I could hear the sound of birds. How—I thought—how could that all have happened? I turned over on my side to face the wall. What a remarkable series of events; I could barely believe in them.
I roused myself, got out of bed, put on my robe, and went into the kitchen to make a plate of toast. I was down to the heel of the loaf and its sad, curving neighbor; it took several attempts to make them look at all appealing. I sat down to eat at the table facing the bay window. As I chewed, I noticed that a glossy black bird with a yellow beak had landed on the lawn and was bobbing along through the grass, its beady eye trained on the ground below. It reminded me of something, though I could not remember what.
So many days and nights had passed without event, really, and then, all of a sudden, so much in one night. Though it was true that I had slept in the comfort of my own bed and been out of the house for only five or six hours, all told, I felt exhausted, like someone recently returned from an extended trip overseas.
From down the hallway I heard the muffled trill of my alarm clock—I had forgotten to turn it off. I went back into the bedroom to flip the switch, and then, seeing the pants I’d worn the night before draped over my chair, I reached into the right-hand pocket and extracted the folded sheet of letter paper I’d retrieved from the guest lecturer’s hotel room desk. Here was the proof, I thought, that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing!
I took it back with me to the kitchen, where I opened the drawer underneath the telephone and took out the piece of hotel notepaper I’d taken from my father’s coat at the open house. With my palm I smoo
thed them both flat. As I’d suspected, except for the appointment—Saturday, 10 am, MC—they were identical. Two steeples, two simple crosses. With my index finger, I traced first one, and then the other.
Through the window, I could see the black bird was scratching madly in the dirt, a ball of frenzied determination, though whatever it was he had in his sights seemed perpetually out of reach. Inside my slippers my feet were clammy, and the two pieces of hotel stationery beside the telephone stared blankly at me, mockingly. Well, they seemed to say, so what? What exactly did your little escapade uncover? That your father stayed the night in a hotel? That the hotel still uses the same kind of stationery? That the hotel’s traditional exterior belies an incongruous, Euro-modern lobby? What are you going to do—make a complaint about interior design?
Without warning, my thoughts skipped to the briefcase under the desk, the buttery feel of its leather, its macabre contents. What about that? The sticky residue? The strange quality of the darkness?
But, I thought, no! and shook the thought from me as a dog shakes water from its coat. That briefcase was of no relevance to me and my projects, there was no way in which it could be traced back to my father’s death. I should not have opened it, I told myself sternly. That was all.
7
On my way to the break room later that morning, I saw that there was an envelope in my mailbox. I tore it open and read the contents as I put the coffee on to brew. It was a bill from the hospital. There had been a misunderstanding earlier this year, and a kind but clearly confused woman had mistaken a perfectly normal remark I had made for something more sinister. It was difficult to recall all the details, as that had been the night I learned of my father’s death, when there were more important things on my mind. One cannot be held accountable for every little thing one says. It had not been my intention, as she had evidently thought, to do anything dramatic. Natural, wasn’t it, I thought, as I puttered around the break room, to have been upset that night, and unfortunate that the old woman had misunderstood.
When, some time later, I returned to my office and looked at the clock, I registered that it was noon with little interest at first. Then I thought, Noon! And sprang up and pulled on my coat, sending the blinds scuttering down the window. Noon was the hour of the lunchtime concert of the Kindertotenlieder, and now even if I hurried I’d be late.
I pushed open the double doors of the breezeway and stepped out into the bright midday sunlight. Below me and to the right was the med school quad, with its green patch of lawn and trio of willows. Little groups of students were scattered here and there on the grass, eating their lunches. At least, I thought, as I stepped through the automatic doors that led to the hospital, I would be unlikely to encounter any of my colleagues at the concert; as a rule they would consider themselves too young and interesting for classical music.
The moving walkway deposited me on the second floor of the hospital, where I took the escalator down to the ground floor and was at once caught up in the densely moving mass of the building’s main artery at the lunch hour. People holding bouquets of flowers tugged at the hands of small children, candy stripers manned their station, and doctors in scrubs, unencumbered, moved with greater purpose than the rest. Here and there one could even spot the sick themselves, dragging their oxygen tanks behind them in their slow and destinationless migration.
When I finally came to the rotunda I was disappointed to see that the performance was already underway. A pale, heavyset young man wearing a black satin cummerbund was standing on the raised semicircle reserved for performers and singing, his large white hands clasped in front of him. Behind him was an enormous arrangement of red gladiolas in a vase, and behind that was a two-story wall of windows that looked out onto the hospital’s front driveway with its big, glittering fountain. There were no seats, I thought at first, with dismay, but after a moment I saw an unoccupied chair in the middle of a row and inched toward it, navigating my way carefully over pairs of feet and mouthing my apologies. Eventually, I found my way to the empty seat, sat down, and gratefully closed my eyes.
At first, I could hear nothing but the sound of my own pulse, throbbing in my temples. The flurry of activity had aroused me, and I found that my thoughts would not stop agitating themselves, like a dog tightly circling its own bed, never settling. This was particularly galling to me because it had been my intention to immerse myself fully in the music.
The music itself—that was another thing. The sound of the young man’s voice singing something slow and sad came to me as if from very far away—as if I were standing in the depth of a valley, and the singer on the peak of a mountain.
There was another, more immediate noise, much closer, nonmusical. Someone was rustling a newspaper, of all things! Well, what can you expect? I thought. I had seen the audience before I’d shut my eyes: the vacant-eyed sick, the elderly, here and there an aloof, dark-skinned aide.
I redoubled my efforts to concentrate on the music … and was startled, genuinely startled, by the unmistakable sound of applause. My eyes flew open. The young man in the cummerbund was inclining his head in a very slight bow. His singing, I realized, had made almost no impression on me at all. Feebly, and feeling foolish, I joined in the tail end of the applause as the young man took his seat, and a sharp-featured young woman rose to take his place.
She positioned herself on the semicircle, adjusting the russet shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders, and gave a small, decisive nod to the piano player, a balding little man in a camel-colored sports coat whom I had not noticed until now. This new singer was slim, with blond hair and an Eastern European look about her. It occurred to me that one did not often see an opera singer of such slim stature. Was the sound better, I wondered, when it emanated from a more spacious architecture? Of course, it was not likely that the field’s best and brightest would be performing at a hospital during the lunch hour. And—another question occurred to me—this Kindertotenlieder, could it properly be called an opera?
But here I was again in danger of being distracted by irrelevant questions, and this time I was determined to listen carefully to the music, and with that in mind I closed my eyes again for the full effect.
Could he not, I thought, several minutes later, and by he I meant not the piano player but Mahler, could he not have made this Kindertotenlieder just a little faster, a little livelier? Then the song might have caught my interest, but unfortunately it was neither of those things, rather it was slow, melancholy, and artless, just a lonely voice wandering up and down the scale, rising and falling with no particular design.
I had a little daydreaming scene just then, in which I stood in the parking lot of the restaurant, as I had the night before, with the guest lecturer, looking out with her over rows and rows of parked cars. It was very quiet in the daydream, as quiet as a tomb, and as chilly and dark, so that I could see the guest lecturer’s breath clearly, in white puffs, as she said, with determination, “It’s a white car.”
Another noise nearby threatened to distract me—a sniffling, prefatory sound, like someone readying to blow their nose—but only for a moment. I tightened my grip on the daydream, in which, now, the guest lecturer and I were crossing the lobby of the Old Mission Hotel, that peculiar, scentless lobby. On our left was the empty bar, with its row of tiny red candles. Did you hear, the guest lecturer was saying, about all the controversy with this place?
Close by, the wet, sniffling noises were becoming more pronounced. The elderly! I thought. My god! Undoubtedly the worst kind of people.
All the controversy, I thought, returning to the daydream. This dirty deal, she had said. But now I was conflating two unrelated moments, I knew: what the guest lecturer had said as we stepped across the lobby, and what had been written on that piece of orange paper that I had found tucked behind my windshield wiper.
These things had the ring of some kind of importance, and yet if I was honest, at my core I felt no interest in them. It was disappointing that they interrupted me no
w. But before I could encourage my thoughts in an alternative direction, the song ended, there was a little peal of applause, and the concert was over.
Was that possible? I thought, astonished. Surely I had only been sitting here for … but then I realized that I had no sense of what amount of time had passed at all.
“How’d you like it?” said a female voice next to me. Even with my eyes closed I could tell it was the same person who’d sniffled loudly through the concert. Of course she would be just the sort of person who would also want to chat afterward, as we were all trapped in our seats. I opened my eyes briefly to look away from the voice and down the aisle, to see if there was any chance of escape, but at the other end of my row a gaunt and ancient man was refusing to be cajoled into a wheelchair, and it was clear there would be no egress for some time.
Begrudgingly, I turned to my neighbor—and stopped short. She was not, as I had imagined, an old woman. Neither was she a stranger. She was Kirstie.
“Oh,” I said, startled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was you.”
Her face, so familiar, was nearer to mine than it ever had been before, all the features I’d seen only in passing were now uncomfortably close: the slightly shiny, slightly wet lower lip, and disappearing upper one, the nose, and the wide-set, mildly bulbous eyes, which now registered a look of surprise.
“You didn’t realize it was me?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
In the intervening silence I noticed that she was dressed not in her athletic wear but, uncharacteristically, in actual clothing: a gray, form-fitting skirt and a cream-colored blouse with a soft ruffle curving down the middle. The effect, on her sturdy frame, was jarring.
“But,” she went on, “I waved to you. I waved to show you that the seat next to mine was empty.”
“I can assure you,” I said icily, “if you did wave, I didn’t see it. I saw myself that this seat was empty.”