"I'll do like you say, I'll go down to the news-stand and get some light reading."
"An author you like. Don't pick up someone who annoys you. Someone somewhat literate."
That's me baby, someone somewhat literate. I'm a man who happened wrong. I should be a writer, for God's sake, but I hear it's an awful profession. They're always going broke. It's a brutal, exploitative field. Oh, God, I've missed my life.
"Good-bye, Cindy, I love you."
Click. We're off. He hangs up the phone thinking that she is an awesomely decent woman. She's a priest, a shaman, Dante. Some people are here to lead the others through life, to succor and to guide. Does she not, in her blond and voluptuous ease, even in her perfection, the calm creator of Kevin and beneficent sustainer of me, does she not deserve my loyalty?
Somewhere in this hotel, right now, there is a woman who will sleep with me. Oh, yes, not Cindy but one of her allies. I will have to go home and go to confession in our pink bedroom, and my penance will be more serious than "say the Our Father three times my son, and keep your hands out from under the covers."
He heard distant howling, as if of a wolf.
It was feeling, it was sensation, his body quaking, bending over, hands clutching the center of his gut, eyes screwed closed, and he was aware of another Atlanta, a ghost Atlanta, when it was all forest, and the things of the earth swept and swished, trotted and crawled here. On the hill where the Westin now stood—which had been completely removed for the hotel, a million-year-old hill—a wolf had howled, a bigger, heavier creature than today's wolves, and his howl had carried up and down the river, and high, high into the night, where it had echoed against the fat rising moon. The howl still lived, domiciled in the hotel's bones.
When Bob was a boy in Texas, he used to imagine that if he ran fast enough, was secret enough, clever enough, he could step off the edge of Texas and onto the full moon. On the moon lived the ghosts often million Indians, and he also belonged there. The Comanches and the Tejas, the Apaches and the Kiowa, the Blackfeet and the Iroquois, the Pueblo and the Mixtec, all would greet him and call him brother, and he would go down the river of heaven in a bark canoe.
Reality: The sun of his youth came up like a big hubcap and Texas kept right on happening. San Antonio grew, row upon row of houses marching out into land so ancient and untouched that fossils lay on the surface, land so delicate that any footfall was permanent. And the power lines marched and the drive-in banks, and the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, and the kids, and the cars, and the law offices.
Bob had gotten himself into a very bad mental state by the time he arrived in the bar. It didn't matter much, there wasn't a woman in the place except for the waitress, who was spreading the vodka tonics and white wines in full armor, visor down. What can you do? Ishtar opens her legs and all the corn of Babylon flowers. When she closes them, the man who was involved gets his head cut off.
"Stoly on the rocks."
"You thought you were getting somewhere but you're not. Am I right?" A guy had edged in beside him, a used-car shill in a bleak checked suit. "Whatever you want, you end up with something else. Is that right or is it right? A guy like you, like me, we get tied up, we can't get away. Well, you have to go for the gold. I always tell people who come to me for advice, buddy, I tell them, go for the gold. You think you have a home but you haven't got a home. You have a mortgage. This is not a home, excuse me, a home would be your own. The four walls belong to the bank, the paper is what belongs to you. We have to get these things straight. The trouble with you, with me, is we cannot get these things straight. We own nothing, have everything. It's all an illusion, complete and total. Am I right? I'm asking you, I'm serious, am I right? Here's a guy, asks you am I right, and you can't get a word in, this guy's not a genius, he's not a guru, he's not even a salesman, he's a compulsive talker in a goddamn bar. Look, you want a decent home for your wife and kids, that's why you're here in this bar. That's why we're all here. We're knights on the journey to the grail, every one of us, even the old fart over there with the stogie, that old pushbelly's Sir Goddamn Lancelot, am I right? Look at this place. Not a skirt in sight. Even the gigged-out old rejects leave places like this alone. Where are the hookers? They are in the places of youth. Not even hookers want us, we are reject johns. Hookers won't bother with a bunch of weepy fifty-dollar tricks. Nowadays even the ugly whores and the sex changes make big bread, you know how they do it? How the hell do they do it, why can't we get them into the Salesman bars anymore? It's S&M ruined us. There was an old war-horse used to come in here to drink and turn a few. Now she's got a posh suite up in the Bonaventure and she's bought herself some whips and a pair of leather gloves. There are guys'll pay a fortune even to them plug uglies to go after them with a whip. Am I right? I miss that damn old rotten whore. They're all the goddamn Blessed Virgin Mary, that's our problem. Blaspheme, blaspheme, etcetera. Excuse me, ma'am—could you bring me another couple of double bourbons?"
The waitress huffed off. Bob, who wanted desperately to get away from this man, but who was also curious about him, had to get rid of a bothersome question. "Is this a pitch for some kind of self-improvement seminar?"
"You ask that?"
"I don't want any more pitches for Jesus. I get Jesus pitches every time I get on a plane."
"That isn't a real question. Who am I, what do I want, those are real questions. You think you have a life but you don't. You do not have ownership, you have debt."
"My car is paid for."
"Wha—well, good goddamn, aren't we wonderful! Oh, may I touch the hem of the garment— well, let me look at you! Your car is paid for! Good goddamn. Well, hell. Isn't that wonderful. I'm so proud of my friend! Here's a guy can fuck the best part of your whole goddamn carefully rehearsed speech! We better be careful, this guy here with the plastic nerdpack in his shirt pocket might be president someday. He drives a car that is his own. Now, looky here, Mr. Smartass. You think your car is paid for, but you're wrong. You don't have the fucking holy grail just yet, Sir Gawain, my brother. Your kids' educations, are they paid for? Is your house paid for? And what about your business, your goddamn swimming pool, your time-share, your TV, your VCR, your home computer? Your car is paid for—what a lie. Unless everything is paid for, nothing is paid for. Your debt is just arranged differently. Look, what I'm leading up to is, you need something that is your own, and that nobody can take away from you. You need a stake in the earth. You need land. Land, man! I know a lot about land. Specifically, I know about the sweetest little piece of eastern Canada ever was. The very sweetest."
Bob thought, Oh, lord, a real-estate salesman.
The pitch drummed on. He was like a penitent before the altar of the hustle. Kneeling at a bulging vest, not reading the contract, the haze of fine print, take the pen, hit it right here, thank you, you have just bought another American dream.
—But it's not paid for either.
Slam, bam, thank you, ma'am. Phrase that became current in Dodge City during the cattle drives, to describe encounters between prostitutes and teenage cowboys who had not seen a woman in years. What is a man like who comes in after two years on the range eating sowbelly and beans, working seven days a week twenty hours a day? Put him in the middle of the biggest, richest city he has ever seen, with three hundred dollars in his pocket, and also give him a gun. That's the American dream, although few of those young men lived to tell about it:
No, they bought real estate with their three hundred dollars and then went out to see their land. Slam, bam, thank you, ma'am. Goin' to Canada to see mah swamp.
Bob signed the contract "Ronald Woodrow Wilson Reagan."
"My God, you have a long name—like a Negro."
"I am a Negro."
"But you look—ah, hell!"
"Sorry."
"I can't sell this stuff to you on time. You've got to pay cash."
"Don't have it."
The real-estate hustler got up and went to the far end of the bar. B
ob, for his part, left ten dollars on the table and slunk out.
He wished, how he wished, that there would come a knock at his door and that tall, beautiful blonde from the Camaro would be standing there, but no knock came. The air-conditioning hissed. He threw off his clothes, ate the mint on his pillow, and then brushed his teeth. He climbed into the bed.
The claws of sleep grabbed him, and he was dragged screaming down the nightmare escalator that never quite gets to the grail.
Chapter Three
YOU LIE ON A BED IN A HOTEL ROOM. YOU ARE NAKED, you are rigid. Nobody cares, nobody will help you. Therefore you go to sleep.
The effect was as sudden and devastating as mainlining gasoline. His breath came in shattering barks, his hands fluttered, his legs kicked, his whole bones twisted in the elastic prison of his muscles. Air swooped in his lungs. Then his nose bloomed with odors, the plastic stench of the drapes, fungus from the air-conditioner filter, the body-ridden bed. This room seemed no longer slick and clean, but rather a dark, thick den swarming with the leftover flakes of a thousand lonely men.
His hands worked at the air. His fingers seemed dull and stubbed, and he felt streaming out behind him a hot dagger of nerves. He tried to touch his face—awful thick nails came up. He groaned, which was a coarse inarticulation. He was full of aches and newness. A leg trampled air, and when he attempted rising, he fluttered and fell in the bed, unable to make himself work right.
His legs skittered in the sheets. Oddly, his hands wanted to work with them. What was he trying to do, crawl?
In his extremity he cried aloud, a sound as high as the air brakes on a truck.
Jesus, was this a stroke?
Get it together!
He scrabbled, he flopped—what the hell was happening!
He was out of control here. With every muscle, with every ounce of his strength he strove to quiet his heaving body.
This was grotesque!
He struggled at least for order, for power over the wild, twisting gyrations.
But his struggles didn't help. As if powered by another soul, his body leaped up, jumping farther than he had ever jumped before, soaring all the way from the bed to the window. He hit the ceiling and fell, grabbing at the curtains, which collapsed around him.
He crouched in their folds. Burning in his mind was an image he had seen as he leaped, a great beast in the mirror, its front paws outstretched, its tail soaring behind it. Experimentally, he tried to feel for the tail. No luck, his arms didn't go back that far anymore. All right. He tried a little hip action. Behind him he heard the thud, thud of something hitting the floor. He felt the weight of it, and the air tickling its fur.
Do not move. This could only be one of two things: complete psychosis or a really bizarre stroke.
What if he was one of those stroke victims who just sit and stare, saying nothing, locked forever in deep universes of fantasy? Or he might be the kind of psychotic who is so unruly he must be abandoned to the violent ward. He is the one so out of it that his care packages from home will always be stolen by the orderlies.
It was damn sad. He started to cry again, but stifled himself when he heard the whines. How could he even talk to Cindy? How could he discuss Kafka with his son, or play chess and Stratego with him, given the apparent presence of paws? Could he even think anymore? This room smelled like cigars, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, perfume, and human sweat.
He raised his head. Something was slipping through the brush nearby.
His immediate reaction was immense relief. If there was brush nearby, this must be a dream after all, because there was no brush in hotel bedrooms.
All right, then let it roll. A man was coming through the brush. Bob cocked his ears, heard the man breathing, heard him muttering, smelled alcohol on his breath. He did not smell the steel of a gun, only leather and cloth and sodden skin. The man was singing to himself as he put up plastic markers in the sodden ground. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed around him, and from time to time he groaned and made a swipe with his arm. He was the real-estate salesman from the bar, and this was the land he was selling. The plastic markers went flying as he made a lunge at the mosquitoes. He took out a can of insect repellent and sprayed the bugs. "All right, you bastards, live with yourselves!"
I am not in eastern Canada and I don't have the ability to smell the vodka and the tonic separately on a man's breath. No, I am alone in a hotel room. I am not in the woods with this repellent old salesman. I do not have long teeth, Granny, I do not have big eyes. This isn't stroke or psychosis, it is one mega-dream.
I am in the Westin Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, Room 403. I have a view down Peachtree Street which I cannot see because no matter how my dream makes them look, the curtains are in fact closed.
He heard the air conditioner hissing, felt the air brushing his fur. A sound in the hall made him snort.
From the doorway there came a knock. Another. Then the door made a clicking sound. A woman hurried into the room, elderly, in a gray uniform with a white apron. "Turndown service. Sir?" A grunt. The lights went full on. "Wha—the curtains!"
In the mirror that covered the wall behind the dresser Bob saw a large dog or wolf standing on the bed staring at the mirror. Startled, he cried aloud. The animal reared back, its barking filling the room, its hackles raised, its teeth bared.
"Oh, no! No pets allowed!" The maid threw all of her mints in the air and jumped back, falling over her cart full of sheets and towels and little bottles of body shampoo.
Bob's difficulty was that he could not find himself in the mirror. Did nightmares have reflections? This had to end soon. Dream or not, he could still see the mints on the floor.
Since he was not a wolf, what had she seen and run off to report? Had he exposed himself to her? Would the vice squad soon be here, ready to take him in, scare him good, and send him home to a furious wife? "Really, Bob, if you want to try it with strangers, why not just call an escort service?" Then the diminished relationship. Fifteen years of loyalty lost to a bad dream.
The maid had left her cart overturned in the hall. Bob, moving awkwardly, trying to keep all four limbs coordinated, went out and sniffed one of the slowly turning wheels. There was a click behind him. He didn't need to look. Of course the unseen hand of nightmare had closed the door.
He sniffed the handle, smelling a strong odor of the maid's hand, mixed of sour skin smell, cigarettes, mints, and body shampoo. He shrank back, thinking that he really couldn't handle sniffing a doorknob. It was part of the perfection of the illusion that he had just automatically done that instead of trying to open the door.
He thought: Probably I onlyfeel like this. What I actually look like is a naked man sniffing a doorknob and I've got to stifle this peculiar behavior!
I'll be calm, straightforward. I was going for the shower and took a wrong turn. Honest mistake. No big deal. Just please God don't let me start barking again!
The worst thing about this experience was that it didn't have the logic of dream or hallucination at all, it had the logic of life. He wished to God for Cindy.
When he heard the elevator bell ring and the doors roll open, a powerful and unexpected instinct asserted itself. He cowered back down the hall, seeking some darkness. Excited voices came toward him. "I swear it's the biggest dog I ever seen." What was this? Was the maid part of the dream, after all, or was he shifting the sense of her words into his own delusional system?
"How he git it into de hotel, dat what I got to know."
"Ask the guest. He must have smuggled it in."
They came around the corner and stopped dead. "Aw, God. It got out." Bob looked up at them. A wave of sensation made him shudder, almost as if there were tiny creatures running on his skin. He felt frightened and dismal. He certainly seemed to be naked on all fours in the hallway of a hotel.
"Its creepin' along, look out."
"We gotta get the police, I ain't gonna touch nothin' that big." Hearing this, Bob cracked. Terror whipped him. He screamed and ra
n for the fire stairs. "Holy shit, it done got some speed on it!" Bob raced down the corridor, his claws catching on the rug.
"We can't let that thing out in the hotel, they'll fire us both!"
"Come on, woman, help me! We can head it off."
The yellow lights glaring down, the beige elevator doors, the confusing twists and turns of the halls, Bob might be in a maze of some kind, the lights too bright, the ceilings too high, the smells all wrong.
He saw writing on a door: EXIT. He threw himself against the bar until the door gave way into the fire stairs.
"That thing's got a mind of its own, it just opened that door."
Down, up, which way to go? Bob heard himself whimpering. He made a solemn vow: When I get home, if I ever do, I will call Monica and make an appointment. I will do this no matter how good I feel at the time. Frantically, he sought reasons for his predicament. Was it the salesman in the bar? Some kind of drug in his drink to make him a more pliant buyer? When he was selling, he had often wished for drugs of some kind. Just a nice little powder in the damn fool's steak sauce, and he becomes silly enough to buy the damn bonds. "Go out among the people, young man, and rape them." Fatherly advice from Charlie Decker, his boss in the bond office. Charles Decker: killed himself with a fingernail file.
Quite arbitrarily he started up instead of down. It was not long, though, before he heard voices behind him. "How high is it?" "Go up to fifteen. You're gonna head it off." "Come on, where's that elevator when you need it?"
Bob was having trouble working his body. If he thought about it, his back legs and his front legs stopped working together and he went to scrabbling. Trying to make his mind a blank, he moved up the stairs. His mind went back to Sister Eustacia, the music teacher at Sacred Heart. Sister Eustacia: playing the piano is a matter of mind over matter. Let your mind float free in the music, and your fingers will find their own way.