Thanks for the Trouble

  Then she stopped. She sat up on top of me like a little kid, her knees spread on either side of my hips.

  “I didn’t think I would want this, Parker. I haven’t for a long time.” She stared up at the sky, thoughtful in the starlight, and recited what I could tell was part of a poem. “ ‘I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.’ ” She let her hands fall to my chest and stared me in the eye with a purpose that unnerved me. “Not here, though. Anywhere but here.”

  NO, YOU DON’T

  AND SO WE RETURNED TO where it all began: the Palace Hotel. I’d never actually stayed there, of course, because the rooms were about four hundred bucks a night. Or eight hundred bucks a night, as it turned out, if you got a suite. Which we did.

  “Let’s have a drink first,” Zelda said, and I got this electric feeling in my stomach at the thought of what that word “first” was referring to. “Have you ever been to the Maxfield? Actually, I believe it’s called the Pied Piper now.”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you’re in for a treat.”

  The Pied Piper was an old-fashioned bar off the Palace lobby, all red leather armchairs and dark wood and bronze globes. Swanky-looking people sat around sipping red wine and whiskey from glasses that seemed way too big for the amount of liquid inside of them. That was something I’d noticed about the hotel restaurant, too—tiny amounts of food were always served on huge plates. It didn’t make any sense. If you were going to serve people minuscule portions, wouldn’t the smart move be to serve everything on minuscule plates, so that the food looked bigger by comparison? Whatever. Rich people were idiots. Give me a colossal BrainWash breakfast burrito any day of the week.

  “I’ll order,” Zelda said. “I’ve got a pretty convincing fake driver’s license. Plus, I’m the only one of us who can talk.”

  I sat down in one of the armchairs and watched her approach the bartender. She made a joke, and he laughed, and then he was mixing up two drinks for her. She never even had to get out the fake.

  “Cheers,” she said, returning with two glasses of scotch. We clinked and drank. It burned all the way from tongue to stomach, but I still nodded when Zelda let out an ahh of satisfaction and said, “That’s smooth.”

  She crossed her legs and leaned back into the chair, swirling her drink like some kind of Bond villain. “So tell me, Parker Santé, what were you really doing here yesterday? Besides taking a long weekend, I mean.”

  I opened up my journal. I like hotels.

  “Why?”

  I don’t know. They aren’t part of real life, because nobody’s here to stay. Also, nice hotels are always a safe place to steal, because everybody’s rich.

  Zelda laughed. “I’d almost forgotten about that! You took all my money!”

  I brought it back.

  “Eventually.” Over the top of her giant glass, she scoped out the room. “Take something right now,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Go ahead. I want to see you in action.”

  It was the work of thirty seconds. There was a coatrack just inside the entrance of the bar. I took a gray cashmere scarf and wrapped it theatrically around my neck, over the scarf Zelda had bought me back at the Legion of Honor. Then I reached into the pockets of a couple of coats until I came up with an antique silver lighter. I returned to my seat and presented it to Zelda.

  “Bravo!” she said, applauding. We toasted again and drank off the rest of our scotch.

  “I’ll get us a refresher,” Zelda said. “And I guess I won’t be needing this.” She threw her fake license onto my lap. Her age was listed as a just barely plausible twenty-two. Under hair color, it said silver.

  It’s funny, I wrote, after she returned with round two. The thing that’s fake about this ID is the exact opposite of what’s fake about most fake IDs. You’re pretending to be younger than you really are.

  She took the license back and looked at it. “I suppose that’s true. But you want to hear a secret, Parker? No one ever really stops feeling young. We may get a job and a husband and a house, but the whole adulthood thing is just a charade. We’re all pretending to have grown up. You know what the cruelest object ever invented is?” I shook my head. “The mirror. It breaks the illusion.”

  Not for you, though.

  “What do you mean?”

  You see the same thing every time, don’t you?

  I’ll admit this question was a kind of challenge. My faithometer had been creeping up all day, but it was still shy of the critical 50 percent mark.

  “Oh, that’s just as bad, really, only in a different way. People don’t like getting older, but they do like changing. Staying the same is a kind of death.”

  My mom told me once that she wouldn’t be a kid again for a million bucks. She said things hurt more when you don’t have any perspective on pain.

  “That’s true.”

  But doesn’t everyone want to be young and hot forever?

  “They only think they want it, Parker. But nobody really wants anything forever. Just for longer than they get it.”

  I want you forever.

  She smiled, then leaned over and kissed me gently with her whiskey-sweet mouth. “No, you don’t,” she said. “But you want me tonight, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “So finish your drink, darling, and let’s go upstairs.”

  I did. Fire all the way down.

  THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINIBAR

  WE TOOK THE ELEVATOR UP to the top floor.

  “Once upon a time,” Zelda said, “this place had big beautiful keys made of bronze. And now?” She held up the white plastic keycard and flicked it. “And so the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.”

  The electronic lock beeped, and we entered the suite.

  Jesus H. Christ. This wasn’t a hotel room. It was an apartment.

  The decor looked like what your grandma would buy if someone gave her a million dollars and no rules. Every available square inch of flat surface had some pricey-looking tchotchke on it. In the living room, a glass tabletop rested on thick cement columns, with a vase of freshly cut roses and a silver bowl of fruit on top (It’s still life, I thought). A couch upholstered in gold and brown lay like a muddy hippopotamus across an Oriental rug, facing the wide maw of a marble-edged fireplace. Shelves that wrapped all the way around the walls had been stocked with the sort of books that could have been film props: leather-bound, ancient, embossed with gold.

  I went into the bathroom, which was covered floor to ceiling with tiny white tiles that glimmered like the inside of an oyster. The tub was set in the middle of the room on a platform. All the faucets were a bright, shiny gold. I appraised myself in the mirror. My black eye was a rainbow radiating out from pink to dark green. I looked older than I had yesterday, and by a lot more than a day. Tomorrow I’d be a different person entirely.

  When I came out again, Zelda was sitting cross-legged in front of the minibar, trying to unscrew the top of a tiny bottle of Maker’s Mark.

  “Oh, the tragedy of the minibar,” she said. “Perennially overpriced and understocked. Besides, only alcoholics drink from little bottles like this.” The A word made me feel a pang of remorse for my mom, on her own back at home. Ignore it, Santé. Keep your head in the game.

  I took the bottle out of Zelda’s hand and helped her to her feet. We faced each other, there in front of a massive four-poster bed. The only light was a golden streak from the cracked door of the bathroom. I kissed the line it cut down her face. Then we were on the bed, and she was taking off my shirt and I was taking off her shirt and that was enough for a while, to feel her warmth and to touch all the soft, dreamy places I’d dreamed about but never touched. And there was a part of me that was like, Just this would be enough, but there was another part of me that was like, Hell no it wouldn’t. Zelda helped me resolve the conflict by unclasping my belt and pulling my jeans off. It made for a funny pause when she took off my socks (let’s face it,
there is nothing remotely sexy about socks), which was good, because it gave us both the chance to laugh. Then I shimmied her jeans (which were technically my jeans) past her feet and we got under the covers in just our underwear. We kissed for a while, in a way that made it feel like things were escalating even though we were still just kissing. Then she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of my underwear and began to tug them downward. . . .

  I grabbed hold of her wrists.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I didn’t even know myself at first. But when she tried to kiss me again, I pulled away.

  “Parker?”

  I reached over to the bedside table for my journal.

  If we’re going to do this, I wrote, I have to know who you are. For real.

  “You know who I am,” she said quietly.

  I don’t, though.

  “Yes, you do. You promised to believe me.”

  That’s not how belief works. You can’t force it.

  “Fine!” Zelda said. “So let’s say I’ve been lying to you ever since I met you, even though it’s not true. Why would that matter? We’re here. You’re here and I’m here and we’re in bed together. What more do you want? What will ever be enough to make you shut up and live your life?”

  It was probably the two glasses of scotch that pushed me over the edge. But after everything we’d been through that day, and in light of everything we were about to do, the idea that she would keep lying to me just about broke my heart.

  I’ll tell you what would be enough. One second of the truth.

  “And what’s the truth, Parker?”

  I gave her my best guess, based on the little evidence I had. You’re a normal seventeen-year-old girl, but someone you care about is very sick, and you don’t know how to deal with it, so you made up this story.

  Zelda was up out of bed even before I’d finished, staring down at me with a palpable fury. “How do you know about that?”

  So it’s true, I wrote in big letters, so she could read them from where she was standing.

  “How do you know about Nathaniel?”

  I could have said it was just a lucky guess; maybe she would’ve even believed me. But I wanted an end to all the lies, not just hers.

  Last night the hospital called. You were asleep when the message came in, so I erased it. And then I made it so your phone wouldn’t get any more calls.

  “You asshole,” she whispered.

  I kept on writing, trying to explain, but she was already getting dressed.

  I was scared you really meant what you’d said about the bridge. I couldn’t just stand by and let that happen.

  She refused to look at what I’d written, no matter how much I ran around the room trying to shove it into her line of sight. Finally I grabbed her shoulder, and she spun and delivered a stinging slap right to my bruised cheek. I was blind with pain for a few seconds, and by the time I recovered, she was gone.

  HOSPITAL FOOD

  LUCKILY, I WAS PRETTY SURE I knew where she was going: the University of San Francisco Medical Center, back in the Sunset. I didn’t have the money for a cab, but I caught the N Judah below Market Street and made it there in less than half an hour.

  A homeless guy in a Yale sweatshirt was sitting just a few feet away from the sliding glass doors, smoking a cigarette directly underneath a NO SMOKING sign. He nodded to me when I passed.

  And pow! Hospital smell like a sucker punch to the nostrils, sending me reeling back to the month I’d spent here after the accident. Mushy food on beige plastic trays. The perpetual beeps and boops of machines that kept people alive or made sure they were still alive or sometimes even brought them back to life. The doctor like some distant father who never stayed quite long enough. Nurses of all shapes and sizes—everything from the gum-smacking almost-teenager to the humorless schoolmarm, from the spheroidal cat lady who insisted on showing me pictures of her “furry darlings” to the hippie nurse with dreads who gave me a book called The Power of Now. All that daytime television, and the weird fascination I had with the Univision telenovela starring the twin sisters who hated each other but loved all the same men. My mother asleep in a couple of wobbly chairs pushed up front to front, whimpering in the darkness.

  I fucking hate hospitals. Which is funny, actually, because they’re a lot like hotels. Both places are populated mainly by people who aren’t planning (or hoping) to spend a lot of time there. Both places have a ton of rooms with more or less the same shit in every one. Both places are constantly being cleaned but still somehow feel incredibly dirty. Of course, there is one important difference: nobody goes to a hotel because they’re about to die.

  The triage nurse looked up from her computer and noticed my epic black eye. She spoke with some kind of Caribbean accent. “You looking for the ER? That’s a nasty one you got there.”

  I’d already prepared my question in the journal. My name is Parker. I don’t speak. I’m looking for Nathaniel Toth. He’s a patient here.

  The nurse began to type into her computer. “Don’t speak, huh? That some kind of religious thing?”

  I shook my head.

  “I got a kid married to a Jehovah’s Witness. Man doesn’t believe in blood transfusions. I say, ‘You know how many lives I’ve seen saved because of blood transfusions? Every day, dozens of people.’ But maybe I’ll get up to heaven and the Lord’ll tell me I can’t come in because I had a blood transfusion once. Then won’t I feel stupid?” She laughed loudly. “Here we go then. Nathaniel Toth. Seventh floor. Follow the signs for Geriatrics.”

  I shared the elevator with a doctor and a bald kid on a gurney. The kid gave me a big smile when I flashed him the peace sign.

  It was past ten o’clock, so the ward wasn’t exactly popping. In fact, no one was working the front desk at all. I walked the hallways, looking into every room. A lot of the patients were still awake, watching their ceiling-mounted televisions or reading some thick paperback. Their names were printed on labels just outside their rooms. It only took a couple minutes to find N. TOTH. I put my ear to the door but didn’t hear anything, so I went inside.

  It was a private room. An old man was sitting up in bed, but he wasn’t awake, or else just didn’t register my coming in. A plastic tube was sunk into his throat, and an IV was stuck into his arm. The EKG beeped.

  On the bedside table, a small collection of framed photographs had been set up. First a young man with a young girl, posed romantically. Then a slightly older man with a young girl, still posed romantically. Then an even older man with a young girl, only now the pose was merely familiar.

  Maybe it wasn’t her in all those pictures. Different members of the same family can sometimes look pretty damn similar. My mom has this one photo of my great-grandfather up in the kitchen. He’s eight years old, posed with his schoolmates. It was taken in Colombia, back in the 1920s or something, but the crazy thing is he looks exactly like I did at that age. My mom even taped up one of my own little class photos next to it, so you could see the resemblance.

  But as I grew up, the physical similarities between me and my grandfather-as-a-boy had faded, whereas the girl here remained a dead ringer for Zelda in every photo. Always the same tiny mouth, the same silver hair, the same oceanic eyes. And who was this guy she was looking at like he was the best thing since the jelly doughnut? Could it really be the same old man who was lying in this bed? I stared at him, trying to find the parallels, but he was skeleton skinny and his face was a back-of-the-cereal-box maze of deep wrinkles. I needed to talk to him, to find out the truth once and for all. I touched his arm as gently as I could. Skin like tracing paper someone had spilled little pools of green and purple ink on. Nothing. I tried again, even shaking his shoulder a little bit.

  “He’s comatose,” Zelda said. I jumped at the sound of her voice.

  She shut the door behind her. In her hand, she held a wet washcloth. “I don’t even know if he can feel this.” She sat down at Nathaniel’s side and began to dab at his fo
rehead. “He started getting really sick at the beginning of the year, but we didn’t move back to San Francisco until August. He wanted to be back in the place where he grew up.” I stood totally still, not trying to sign or write anything, as if I could apologize for what had happened at the Palace by just shutting up and letting her talk. “I lost him for good a few days ago. They told me he’d probably slip away on his own. That was the phone call I was waiting for.” She’d begun to cry, and though I wanted to reach out to comfort her, I held myself back. “But I just spoke to the doctor. It seems Nathaniel’s stabilized. That was the message they left for me last night. He could stay like this for months before he goes. So now I’m supposed to decide when to—because I’m listed as his granddaughter and only surviving relative. Can you imagine?”

  She dabbed at her eyes with the washcloth, then set it aside.

  I felt my faithometer rushing forward. All these photographs of a girl who never seemed to age. 60 percent. The stubborn way she’d held to her story all day, no matter how many times I accused her of lying. 70 percent. Her encyclopedic knowledge of art and history and scotch, her maturity and sophistication. 80 percent. The stupid way she danced. 90 percent.

  Zelda used her fingers to wipe the wet strands of silver hair off the old man’s forehead, with a tenderness that was more than daughterly, and the last of my doubts melted away. Everything she’d told me was true. She’d been born two hundred and forty-six years ago in Germany, and the man in this bed was her husband, and when he died, an hour or a day or a year from now, she had every intention of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. And hadn’t we read in biology class about a woman in France who lived to be 122? Zelda’s story had never been strictly impossible—just really, really, really unlikely.

  I believe you, I wrote in my journal.