Via Dolorosa (4 page)

“It’s only rain,” he told her. He tried to recall the sensation of her warm legs and cold feet against him beneath the sheets as he had experienced it as recently as the night before. But it seemed a distant memory, and it was as though something deep within him refused him access to it. He remained on his back, unmoving, his eyes locked on the patio doors across the room, and on the shape of the girl standing before them. “Everything,” he said, “will be better and back to normal once it passes.”

“Do you promise?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think it’s possible for the whole island to drown?” the girl asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure? It seems like something I might have heard once, or maybe read in the papers.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s a tremendous amount of rain.”

“It’s a very large island. Anyway,” he said, “they’re prepared for storms like this.”

“I saw that,” said the girl.

“Saw what?”

“The blue signs posted along the highway on the drive in. Didn’t you see them? They were big blue signs with a picture of a hurricane on it. We drove in along the evacuation route.”

“This is just a storm,” he said, “not a hurricane.”

“Can you be so sure?”

“Hurricanes are different. They’re stronger and there’s more wind and they come much more suddenly than a regular storm.”

“Have you ever been in a hurricane?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

He shifted his eyes away from the patio doors and stared up at the ceiling. The room was suddenly very dark. He watched for quite a while the blinking red eye of the smoke alarm above him.

“How do you know?” she said again.

“Excuse me,” he said, peeling the sheet off and standing and moving across the small room to the bathroom. He turned the light on and washed his face in the sink. There were seashells placed randomly around the sink basin; she had spent yesterday afternoon collecting them at the edge of the water. He continued to wash his face and to examine it in the long mirror above the sink.
What a long, sad, old-looking face you are,
he thought.
You’ve only been on this earth twenty-seven years, and what an
old-looking face you are.

The water felt good. Until now, he hadn’t realized he’d been perspiring. It was a small, deeply enclosed bathroom, claustrophobic and damp. The moisture from their morning shower still hung in the air. They’d gotten their clothes sandy and wet yesterday down by the water, and she had hung them across the retractable clothes line over the tub to dry them out. He went to them and felt them now. The clothes were still damp and stiff with sand.

Back in the room, he was somewhat relieved to find the girl asleep in the big bed. He stood for some time, listening to the unlabored ease of her breathing over the strong rush of the storm, and did not move.

—Chapter II—

He dressed quietly in the dark, not wanting to wake the girl, and slipped out of the room into the narrow, peach-colored hallway of the hotel. Here, the lighting was poor and there were no windows along the hallway. The wallpaper was undeniably floral in pattern, though faded with age and vaguely nondescript, the way shapes on the horizon may sometimes look to someone suffering from nearsightedness; sections peeled at the corners and rolled up in brittle, curled, cigarette shapes. They were on the sixth floor, six doors down from the stand of elevators, and as he walked to the elevators he counted down the numbers on all the doors silently in his head as they gradually descended.

Downstairs, the lobby was quiet. Nick walked its length, conscious of the urgent rush of rain against the lobby skylights, and of his footfalls desperate and lonely on the linoleum. It was an old hotel, and the ground-level corridors were not open and spacious and brightly lit but, rather, small and serpentine and hard to find. At times, it was like wandering lost through the subconscious mind of a senile old man. Before a blank wall toward the rear of the lobby, Nick paused and, hands wedged in his pockets, looked up at the rough sketching there done with a series of graphite pencils, completed over the past two weeks.
Completed?
he thought.
Is it really?
Colorless, unfulfilled, the sketch was like the ghost of some long-dead reality. It was rough, raw. He stepped back to take it all in. He did not like it, he realized. He’d given it two days to sit, had thought he would like it, or at least would be contentedly pleased with it, but standing here now, he found he did not like it and was not pleased with it at all.

The sketch was of a quaint summer courtyard, not dissimilar to the hotel’s own courtyard, dense with magnolia blossoms and tropical fronds, abutted by a great sprawling sea and bisected by a winding stone path. There were people, various people, populating the landscape, but their evolution had been temporarily stunted at rough caricatures, their sexes indeterminable, their emotions nonexistent. He had sketched them then discarded them then sketched them again. He had sketched until his sketching hand ached and pained him and became so insubordinate that he could no longer work. Looking at the drawing now, he felt it was too naked to move forward, and he silently wondered when he would feel right—or if he would ever feel right—about moving ahead with the process.

Process,
he thought.
See that? It has become a process, some process.
There is no art left here. It is mechanical; it is processed.

He stepped back around to the front of the lobby, suddenly wanting to smoke but knowing for certain it would be unwise to risk stepping outside to do so. Even the sprawling arcade that covered the gravel driveway would afford no protection against the biting wind and strong, driving rain. Still, he wanted a smoke. He’d seen people smoking in the bar, hadn’t he? Yet he couldn’t recall. For a brief moment, he entertained the notion of disabling one of the smoke alarms in the ground-floor bathroom off the lobby, but just the thought of it—and the sense of deviousness and, moreover, self-pity associated with the act—caused him to quickly brush the idea aside. Was he really going to become some lunatic disabling smoke alarms in hotel bathrooms just for a few quick drags?

He saw that the bell captain’s podium was left unattended. There was no clerk behind the front desk, either. The lobby was a mausoleum.

The hotel bar, on the other hand, was still somewhat awake, its limited patrons like defeated athletes who, following the onset of age and unavoidable physical deterioration, had grown bitter and nostalgic in their despondency. Nick straddled the stool nearest the wall of windows so he could listen to the rain at his back. Glancing around, he saw an elderly man with a rough-looking face and a comically bulbous nose seated at the opposite end of the bar, absently peeling the label from a bottle of domestic beer. Across the room at one of the tables sat another man, heavyset, intense and deeply Hispanic-looking, alone except for half a bottle of Chianti served traditionally in its woven basket. It was a good hotel that respected tradition and still served their Chiantis in woven baskets, Nick thought. Then, on the heels of that:
Listen to me,
sitting here and thinking to myself like some goddamn old man, or like some
bitter
old
war veteran. It must be my old face making me think like this.
What a lousy old bastard of a face.
Looking up, he saw only the conga-line of bottles above the counter. There was no wall-length mirror behind the bar, and for that he was grateful.

Even at this hour, he could not stop his mind from thinking. It was difficult, he found, to summon the memory of the people they both had been—both together and individually—just a single day ago. Difficult…but not impossible: a few glittering shards managed to survive deep within him, valued and sparkling like treasure at a moment when it seemed everything else had been demolished by the holocaust…but in uncovering these truths he felt himself torn between the reality of the world he now lived and the utter fakeness of all he wished the world could be. It was a child’s foolish daydream, and he was suddenly very much that child. Yet knowing this did not help anything. There was no getting beyond it. God, he wished he could get beyond it.

Don’t think,
he told himself.
Stop thinking.
It was good advice.

He couldn’t stop.

The bartender eventually made his way down to the end of the bar and Nick ordered a Dewar’s and water.

“I can smoke in here, can’t I?”

“All you want,” the bartender said. “I’ll even get you an ashtray.”

Nick crooked around on his stool and watched the rain pelt the wall of windows. The trees in the courtyard, black and panicked, shook in the tempest: sinners at the foot of an angry god.

“I know how you feel. I’ve been here two years now,” the bartender said, “and I still can’t sleep when it pours like this. They say it takes some time getting used to. I wonder if I have that kind of time.”

“So this is normal?”

“Last summer, we had such a storm blow in that the winds uprooted some of the trees from the front quad and pushed one through those big plate-glass windows in the lobby. The original windows were stained glass and there were jagged little bits of colored glass all over the place. We were finding pieces of colored glass for the next few months. Not to mention all the stuff from outside the wind brought in. You’d be surprised how well bits of glass can hide.”

“I can believe it.”

“Well, at least you had a few good days before the storm came,” the bartender said, setting the drink on the bar. “At least you had a chance to enjoy the beach some, too.”

“Oh, yeah,” Nick said. “The beach.” He sipped his drink then took a deep, healthy swallow. The scotch tasted calm and smoky and the alcohol was quite liberally distributed. “I’d forgotten what it felt like to be out on the water. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen the ocean.”

“You can’t beat the ocean, man,” the bartender said. “I take my boat out on the water every single night. It’s especially impressive at night. Really puts into perspective how small we all are.”

“Yeah, we’re specks.”

“Lost little specks. Like broken bits of glass.”

“I just got real tired of sand without water,” Nick said. “I’m tired of hot and I’m tired of yellow and I’m tired of dry.”

“That’s why the ocean’s good. You’ll see it again. The storm will pass,” the bartender said. “Beginning of summer, it’s always like this. Sometimes it’s worse, too, like I said, when the tree was thrown through the windows. But it’s normal. It’s like some introduction. Wouldn’t be summer without the first big summer storm to set things in motion.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Wonder if it’ll affect the cicadas.”