He wakes up swathed in damp linen, on an iron-framed bed, fully dressed and baking in the dim, kaleidoscopic light filtered through a fretwork shutter, in the Hotel Raffles.
He doesn’t remember getting into bed. He doesn’t know how he got here. Although his mouth is dry, he isn’t hung over, and it takes him a while to recall the beer. Then he’s seized by a dank presentiment.
Kablooey.
There’s an unframed, speckled mirror on the wall he doesn’t remember. His bags aren’t where he left them. What’s more, he’s sure he recalls the bed being placed against the left wall. Now it’s against the right wall, and though it makes no medical sense, he interprets this as a sign of returning epilepsy, some glitch of hemispheric differentiation which means he’s thrown a seizure –
possibly grand mal –
in front of Her. Then blacked out and been carted here by paramedics.
No matter how many times he tells himself that didn’t happen, he continues being chilled and mortified by that seizure. He needs a doctor. He never wants anyone to look at him again. Somehow he has to get back to California without ever leaving this room.
He rolls to look under the bed for his bags, and spots first his copy of The Celestine Prophecy, the purple cover looking fissured and beaten, the spine broken deeply. That’s strange, too; it was pristine when he unpacked it. It’s as if he staggered back here (or was dumped off his stretcher here), sat right up and read 200 pages at a sitting.
And the bags aren’t there. Only his briefcase lies alone, the emptiness around it made horribly apparent by the white-tiled floor.
Now he feels the meaty drumming of hangover in his skull. Poum poum, it harps on. He flashes on the phrase: the last knockings.
Eddie baby, he tells himself, you can’t just hang here upside down all day waiting for your head to pop. A, you got better things to do. B, what do I know from B? B is for blah blah fucking blah.
He hangs there upside down.
She came back with him. For some unknown reason, she stayed up all night reading The Celestine Prophecy before ripping off his luggage.
Now she’s gone.
His heart writhes.
He dives to yank the case out. Now he has to ensure his passport is there, his traveler’s checks, his toothpaste, for Christ’s sake, which at this moment if he’s lost –
Cradling the briefcase in his lap, he works the tumblers feverishly. The combination’s easy: his birthday, 11 06 68. But when he’s got them lined up and pokes the catch, nothing. He re-aligns them, cursing the tickle of sweat that creeps down his brow. No, nothing. He tries 06 11 68, just in case: nothing nothing. And he’s trying 11 06 68 for the third time, dripping with fear, when she walks in.
She looks as startled as he is. She’s wearing a threadbare cotton bathrobe, carrying a plastic bag with a bar of soap in it, wet from the shower.
He says, “I’m just . . .” and shakes the briefcase. “I can’t get it to open for me, I don’t get it.”
She says, “21 21 21.”
“What? You changed the combination?”
She just frowns.
He begins to work the tumblers again, blushing now so he’s in all kinds of pain and heat and his fingers feel thick and tremble, and as he gets the numbers in their neat configurations at last, she says,
“What do you want in my briefcase?”
He freezes. Finally he says, “This is your briefcase?”
“Yes.”
“The – you’re reading The Celestine Prophecy?”
“Yes.”
“It’s crap.”
“I know.”
At that moment, from the mosque across the street, the call to prayer blares out, amplified to a rock-concert boom. Eddie busts out laughing. Leaning on the briefcase, out of breath, he belly-laughs, though it pounds up in his forehead. She is regarding him, very poised and unlaughing, with the air of someone politely hearing something out before objecting.
And as the din subsides, she’s saying, “Why are you trying to open my briefcase? I don’t understand.”
He catches his breath and says, “I’ve got one just like this. I mean, I just assumed this was my room.”
“Oh.” She puts one hand to her throat and takes a deep breath. When she lets it out, she’s smiling but wan. She says softly, “The old identical suitcases sketch.”
He blurts, “I don’t remember last night.”
She shakes her head. “Look, as you’ve got the briefcase, would you mind fishing my towel out? I forgot it when I went to shower.”
“It’s in here?”
“Everything’s in there,” she says. “That’s my home, you know.”
He shoves the catch and the case opens to a sloppy assembly of clothes, on top of which, indeed, is a small hotel towel. And on top of that a photograph: a standard 8-by-10 glossy, loose in a clear plastic report folder.
It’s the portrait of a handsome young Army officer, leaning against a palm trunk in bright, intrusive sunlight. The sky is bleached; the light settings must have been slightly out. Eddie knows it well; he has the same snap on his bedroom wall at home.
He looks up at her, trembling deeply in all his joints. It takes a long time before he trusts himself to speak.
“Why do you have a picture of my father in your briefcase?”
She ducks in an impulse of surprise, steps back. The seconds that pass then are painfully long, as if each has to fall a long distance. She is smiling a taut, unnatural smile. She says: “It came with the frame.”