I STRUGGLED TO get out of the bathroom. Youngsters called after me, demanding answers. Elders called good luck. Echoes of “You would know” bounced off the tiles.
I returned to the ballroom. The woman was gone. The table in the corner where she’d sat was vacant except for four dying drinks. One was a tall, milky tumbler that smelled of coffee. A Brown Russian? My lactose intolerance burbled at the thought. This had been her drink. The other three were watery whiskeys, which I poured together and drained in quick gulps. Coin-shaped ice pieces caught in my throat.
When the whiskey was gone, I took stock of the party. Tables were surrounded by me, in various stages of drink. Food was disappearing quickly. I finally noticed the acidic taste in my mouth; I hadn’t eaten. A fist of hunger wrapped around my stomach.
I made my way to the buffet tables outside the ballroom. I was nearly too late. Sterno warmed empty, sauce-crusted trays, and the hall stifled with chemical fumes and heat. I filled a plate with what remained of the tray of overcooked Swedish meatballs and found a basket of breadsticks near an overturned soup station. I couldn’t recall getting to the food later than this. I made a mental note not to do so again and promised myself that next year I would hide a fork underneath the first table. I repeated the promise to myself several times. Occasionally this worked. Repeated promises sometimes stuck, and I sometimes kept them. I’d once managed to hide a half bottle of vodka in an empty planter for the Youngster who’d dreamed of finding one there. Still repeating my promise to leave myself utensils, I placed my food on the floor and crawled under the tablecloth.
Apparently my future self had remembered my wish and been benevolent. There was a serving bowl, rather large, and for a quick instant I hoped I’d had the foresight to put a roll under there, too. Pleased with myself, I lifted the bowl. Beside the fork and knife that I had hoped for lay a black revolver with a wooden handle, its barrel hole large enough to have an echo.
Crouched there in the dark with my utensils and firearm, I resolved never to emerge from underneath the tablecloth. I reached out blindly and felt for my plate but found someone’s foot instead. Just beyond the tablecloth’s hem stood a pair of highly polished shoes. They were handsome, much better than what I was currently wearing with my expensive suit. I recognized them as the pair I’d worn out last year.
Without meaning to I said, “Nice shoes.”
“Thanks.” The clatter of china. The other knelt down and handed me my plate of coal-lump Swedish meatballs. It was Savior. “How goes it?”
“Fine,” I lied. I put the bowl back over the gun.
“What are you doing under there?”
I shrugged. “You know. Getting away. It can be”—I waved nonspecifically—“out there, you know.”
He nodded as if he understood. I was tipsy and could tell from his blurred eyes that he was, too. Had I done this back then? Had I found myself under a table? Even tipsy I think I would have remembered it. What changes were spiraling away from that unbroken nose?
“The whole nose incident,” he said. “What was that all about?”
I shrugged again, as if to say, How should I know? or to imply that he should already know. I couldn’t make him any more confused than I was myself. I wanted to say, I have a gun. Instead I said, “Look, I just want to eat these meatballs and be done with it.” I lifted the fork from the floor and tried to spear one. Impervious to tines, the meatballs spun away, ricocheting around the plate.
“If there’s something major happening, I can help.”
“I know you mean well,” I lied. We both knew that Savior was only in it for himself. He had created a huge paradox simply to avoid a broken nose, which I still had. I’d been selfish. He was selfish. Had been and was, the ends of my maturity spectrum, and I was probably lying to myself about where on that spectrum I fell now. So depressing it was funny. I smiled. “Nothing you can do because there’s nothing to do. Everything’s fine. I just … well, it’s rather busy up there.” I pointed toward the underside of the table.
Savior looked at me, his eyes inscrutable. “You would know.”
I winced internally. “Yes, I guess I would. Perhaps I’ll see you at the bar. I’ll buy you a drink.”
He nodded and stood. I was left with only his shoes. I felt a little pride in having picked them out. I’d always thought of myself as hastily put together—part of the reason I’d been so proud of the suit I now wore—but those shoes, they were the real deal.
He tapped one foot against a table leg. “See you at the bar, then. Enjoy the meatballs.”
“Thanks.”
I watched him disappear through a gap in the tablecloth, then pulled it back into place. The grayish orange light somehow seemed brighter filtered through the white tablecloth, which glowed as if charged. I lifted the serving dish.
The revolver still terrified me. The wooden handle, polished and clear of fingerprints—though I knew whose fingerprints ought to have been there—called for my palm. The black snub nose caught the low light and yawned at me. It wasn’t as large as I first imagined but seemed larger than it needed to be. I picked it up, surprised by the serious weight of it, and turned it over in my hand. Fully loaded. Smell of oil.
I searched around me, wondering why I hadn’t provided a note for myself. If I’d had time to plant a gun, I’d certainly had time to write a short message: Here’s a gun. You need to shoot X. Good hunting. My mind bounced over the myriad options for who my target might be. I was already going to die in less than a year—what more could I be expected to do? I’d already created an even larger paradox with my nasal examination—all the swarming younger selves who’d witnessed my effort to get to Savior and Nose would have altered memories. And Savior himself, he was on a path I couldn’t begin to predict. What had I done to him? I wondered about where he’d gone after leaving me here, under the table, and could recall only the entrance to the ballroom, staring through the open door and seeing a herd of children streak past, screams echoing in the great room. Paradoxes still unfolded, my actions too large to have a single, predictable effect. Reflections in a splashing puddle. I’d made my past fluid, kept a stable history from reaching me. Perhaps the gun was a promise from a fluid future. The Youngsters didn’t have my nose. Did the Dandy? He was my Elder; he should have my nose, but I hadn’t checked. Was I now outside their timeline? Perhaps I’d cut myself loose from what I had done and what I was to have done. And was the Body connected to the others anymore? Did he share my broken nose? I didn’t care to follow the line that might connect me to him. Easier to imagine myself cut free from everyone here. Like an untethered boat, drifting on innumerable river currents.
I shoved the gun into my jacket pocket, smoothed it against my side, and shoveled Swedish meatballs into my mouth. Images of the Body haunted me. I would have to find it and search for the connection. I didn’t want to.
When I crawled out from under the table, Yellow was looking for me, his face hard and red. “There you are.”
“You don’t remember my little hideaway?”
“You’ve got lots of little hideaways, you know. Have you been drinking?”
“Only to calm myself.”
Yellow walked off, and I followed. If he truly didn’t remember eating the meatballs under the table, he must not remember the gun either. I said, “You know, it seems like I’m a bit untethered.”
“Untethered. Yes. Good word for it.”
“You recall the sensation, then?”
He straightened, as if trying to make himself taller than me. “Of course. You’ve done something major to our past.” I don’t think I imagined the blame in his voice, and he refused to look at me.
We walked along the hall, away from the ballroom. “Given this some thought, I see.”
“Yes,” he said, condescending sneer flashing at me, and then, after a pause, “and I’ve been chatting with Seventy.” I was starting to hate his sweater.
We went through a service entrance and took the back staircase, filthy with greasy handprints, up two flights. At the third-floor landing, Yellow held the door for me. “You’ll have years to speculate about all of this.” He avoided looking at me when he spoke. I smelled cleaning chemicals; the hallway outside the stairwell was dark. “Where are we?”
“Something I have to show you.”
“Not again.”
“Just go to the right. Second door.”
I followed his directions, and he followed me. My jacket hung uneven from the gun’s weight, and I tugged down on the opposite side. I passed the first door and approached the second, from which light fell through to the corridor’s floor. Shadows moved and voices echoed. As I stepped into the doorway, I was blinded for a moment by the brightness. A ceiling fixture with three high-wattage bulbs and a cluster of floor lamps illuminated every corner. The room’s windows were papered over, and rain lashed against them. Along the walls dozens of chairs were stacked one upon another; piles of table linens and round tabletops leaned against the dark windows. In the room’s center sat a table, its round top covered by a white cloth. The cloth lay over a human figure, turning it into a landscape, a snow-covered mountain range, head and feet the highest peaks. At either end stood Seventy and Screwdriver.
I cleared my throat. So did they.
Seventy placed a hand on the tabletop. For a long moment, I thought he would pull back the cloth in some sort of magical reveal. Even though I’d already seen the Body, the idea disturbed me. I didn’t want to see it again. I knew I needed to see it again. I wondered when I’d begun to think of it as “it.”
Instead Seventy used the table for support. “How goes your investigation?”
I let out a breath that sounded like a tire deflating. “Well, I did meet a woman.”
“You saw a woman.”
“Yes. With you. Who is she?”
Seventy and Screwdriver looked at each other. Seventy’s posture spoke of secrets, but Screwdriver released a shuddering breath that reminded me of Sober, and I caught a whiff of his grim determination. I wanted to ask questions I knew he wouldn’t answer. Voices, nasal and angry, came from outside—parrots just beyond the papered windows, arguing about investment opportunities.
Seventy said, “When you’ve met her, you can say you met her.”
“I’m not trying to be difficult. You’ll understand when you meet her. There’s a huge difference between seeing her and meeting her,” Seventy said. “And a larger difference between meeting her and knowing her.”
“All right, so I saw her. I’ll meet her later.” I tried one more time. “Who the fuck is she?”
Yellow, who was still standing behind me, placed a hand on my shoulder. “Be kind. Avoid your normal pedantic, condescending tone. She can’t stand it.”
I was disappointed that the drinks I’d had downstairs were wearing thin, and Yellow’s comment pushed me toward surly. “You would know.”
Screwdriver said sharply, “Watch your mouth.”
Seventy raised a hand. “Enough. We’re all on the same side here.”
Any thoughts I’d had of revealing the gun to them disappeared. Either they knew I had it, in which case I’d be revealing something as obvious to them as my shoe size, or I’d be tipping my hand. Why I felt I had or needed a “hand,” I didn’t know. But I did, and I kept it hidden.
Seventy took hold of the cloth. With all the spontaneity of someone who had waited thirty-odd years to utter a line from a play, he said, “It’s time for you to see the next great piece of our puzzle.” Then he pulled off the cloth.
As I’d feared, I had to look at the Body, which had become a he again to me. He lay there, eyes half open, hands to his sides in a supplicant position, with an expression of almost willful acceptance of his fate. Practically shrugging at death. I’d witnessed supposed saints laid in tombs with less beatific expressions.
The Body’s beard resembled the Drunk’s, though more neatly trimmed. His clothes were rumpled and askew, revealing the parrot tattoo on his wrist. I looked quickly at Screwdriver’s and Seventy’s wrists to see if I could catch a sign of it there. They both somehow chose that moment to tug cuffs lower.
Yellow guided me forward so we all stood like the points on a compass. As we listened to the thunder, I glanced from Yellow, slightly hostile but also somewhat sympathetic, to Seventy, the elderly statesman of the group, to Screwdriver, who struck me as grim and threatening. I wanted to examine the Body’s face to see if he shared my imperfect profile but couldn’t make myself. “So.”
“Dipshit,” said Yellow as he took hold of the Body’s head. “So you’re looking at this.” He turned it to the side. At the base of the neck was a bullet hole—large enough for two fingers—with blue-black bruising around it.
Seventy pointed at the wound, his finger shaking at the end of a tremoring arm. “He was shot. We were shot. You will be shot.”
Yellow took hold of my shoulder. “You. You will be shot.”
I dug my hands into my jacket pockets and wrapped my right one around the too-heavy gun. It was slick under my fingers. My stomach tightened with disgust as I realized that everyone here was a liar. “Why didn’t you show me this earlier?”
Yellow straightened to our full height and said, “Because we didn’t show you until now.”
“It’s something we all remembered.” Seventy let go of the table. He vacillated between looking like the most frail and the most competent of us.
“No.” Seventy, voice calm, hands shaking. “That’s the exit wound. Entry is under the chin.”
Screwdriver, apparently serenely capable of touching the Body as often as necessary, tilted the head so that I could see the hairs on his chin. What I noticed at first were the stray whisker clippings that rested on his collar, as if just trimmed. Screwdriver pointed to the hole lost in the beard. We all nodded.
I said, “Gun?”
“We don’t know.” Yellow shook his head. “Probably a .22.”
I knew nothing about guns. I should read up, I thought. “Do you know about guns?”
“Enough. I read up. Researched. Picked up a few things.”
“Picked up a few things about guns or picked up a few guns?”
He raised his eyes to me. “What?”
I’d said too much. “Nothing, I was just wondering. Never mind.” He certainly didn’t seem to know about the gun. In fact, he seemed rather confused. I kept my hands in my pockets, teetering between panic that I looked like I was hiding something and panic that I would end up lying dead on a dinner table in a third-floor storage room. Still leaning over the Body, I made myself look at his face. The nose had my bump. This was me. Would be me.
Screwdriver cleared his throat. From my perspective he was the three on a clock. Yellow was the nine, Seventy the twelve.
Eyes so wet they could lick me, Seventy studied me across the table. “Something’s not right here.”
I met his gaze. “What?”
“This isn’t how I remember things. I’m getting confused.”
Yellow nodded. “Me, too.”
Screwdriver, also nodding, rubbed at his temples.
Yellow looked at me. “You should have known already that he was shot.”
I rubbed the gun in my pocket. “How should I have known?” I’d never wanted to look at something as much as I wanted to look at that gun at that moment.
Seventy gripped the edge of the table for support. “This can’t fall apart. Not now.”
Screwdriver grabbed a chair from the nearest stack and set it on the floor. He helped Seventy sit. Seventy patted his arm with affection, as a father would a son. Was I really to get so old that I thought of myself as a child? I wondered. Then I remembered that the corpse on the table before me was a possible answer to my question.
Seventy took deep breaths and held his hands over his eyes. “I need a drink.”
Both Screwdriver and Yellow looked from him to me with wide eyes. Yellow gestured to my jacket. “You’re the only one with anything.”
With great reluctance I let go of the gun. I feared they would see through my pocket, as if my hand had offered it protection. I pulled the flask, newly heavy with scotch, and handed it to Yellow. He unscrewed the cap and tilted the flask toward Seventy’s nose like smelling salts, as if the odor alone would be enough. I knew it wouldn’t be.
“Go on, give it to him,” I said. It was the first time I’d told an Elder what to do, the first time one had ever listened. This felt different. The confusion and fear on their faces put me in control. I was no longer tethered, I reminded myself. They didn’t know what I might do. Of course, neither did I.
Yellow wrapped Seventy’s old fingers around the flask and held them there until they grasped on their own. When he let go, his hands shook a little. Seventy’s eyes were closed, wet running onto his cheeks—not tears, something thicker. He put the flask to his heavy lips and tilted it back. Scotch poured into his mouth, and he choked, spit it out, coughed again. I watched him with absurd fascination. He tipped it gently this time, gulped it down, stopped, and then tipped again.
Yellow took hold of the old man’s hand, pulled the flask away. “I think that’s enough.”
Seventy gave up the flask with effort, and Yellow passed it to me. I took a sip from it. He had emptied more than half. I promised myself to go back down and fill it. Perhaps steal a bottle.
Seventy looked up at me. “The good scotch.”
“Of course.” I wiped the flask mouth and recapped it.
“You will have to hurry down to refill that. The Brats are about to run low.”
Yellow didn’t like us chatting about alcohol. He shot me daggers as he patted Seventy on the back. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Seventy shuddered. “I’ve got some bad twinning going on. A lot of history that’s severed.” He looked from Yellow to Screwdriver and back. “Things aren’t as they should be. I remember both of your perspectives, but this isn’t how this played out. It’s getting muddy here. As if we’re all untethered.”
“That’s just what he said, ‘untethered.’ ” Yellow pointing a finger at me. “When we were outside.”
“Did I?” A silly denial. It was all I had.
Yellow frowned at me. “Don’t pretend you don’t remember.” I wondered at what point I became so humorless.
Seventy ran a hand over his face. “Suffering with youth. That’s all I’ve ever done.”
“What can we do?” Fear was Yellow’s driving force. I wondered if he had some stake closer to this than even I did.
“Nothing to do.” Seventy listened to the rain on the window, eyes unfocused. I thought I heard wheels grinding deep inside his head. “We figure this out. The murder, the untethering.”
The four of us each had our own death to prevent, but each of us was too myopic to consider anyone but himself. Each of us in that room was a ball of self-centered anxiety, a nervous animal waiting for the opportunity to claw. Yellow, twitching with panic, kept himself at a distance, his arms folded defensively. “But what caused it all?”
“Well I think that’s obvious.” Screwdriver locked my gaze and then turned away. I was somehow at fault, or would be, soon, but he wasn’t blaming me. I suddenly felt I could trust Screwdriver. His anxiety was softened by a sadness. He approached this as so much business to deal with, and yet when he looked at me, it was with sympathy.
Yellow snapped at me, “What the fuck did you do?”
Seventy raised a hand. “Stop it. He doesn’t know. All he knows is what has happened, not how it’s different. It’s Nose and Savior all over again. You do know about the nose?”
I kept my hand near my pocket. “Yes. I know about the nose.”
“Good.” Seventy nodded to himself. To Yellow he said, “Now, you should take him upstairs.”
Yellow did such a comic double take that I nearly laughed. “What? I remember he doesn’t see it until—”
Seventy stopped him with another raised hand. “Don’t you see? Events are already out of our recall. Sticking to your memory doesn’t help, and keeping another piece of information from him only increases the chance that he won’t find it. We should have shown him the bullet hole downstairs. Something isn’t working, and we need to force the issue.”
Seventy’s voice was small, but both Yellow and Screwdriver lowered their heads and took it in. Screwdriver looked slightly nauseated, and I wondered if it was because he was older, that, like Seventy, he was getting more confusion of memory, more twins running through his head. We were all so much the same person in our paranoia and fear—so many identical expressions passing over our faces, our hands dipped into pockets at the same angle—that for a moment it struck me as funny.
Finally Yellow put a hand on Seventy’s shoulder. “You stay here and rest. Go downstairs when you feel better.” He didn’t need to tell anyone that he meant for Screwdriver to stay there with Seventy. To me, over his shoulder, “Come on. There’s something else you need to know.”
“And then?”
“And then you’re on your own. Things have unraveled here. We have nothing else to show you.” He marched out of the room.
Seventy gave me a smile. “You can do this. Don’t worry.”
I nodded and followed Yellow out the door.
Seventy called to me, “Keep an eye out for a gun.”
I stopped and looked back at him. Was there something in his face that said he knew? Yellow, from the hallway, said, “What if he’s already found it?”
I watched Seventy watch me. “Have you?”
“No.”
Neither Seventy nor Screwdriver blinked.
Yellow said, “What if he’s lying?”
Seventy thought a moment, then scratched at his chin. “If he’s lying, he’d better have a damn good reason.”
Yellow returned to the doorway, stood shoulder to shoulder with me. “Do you? Have a reason?”
“If, and I’m not saying I did, but if I’d found a gun, wouldn’t it be wise to keep it to myself to be certain of where it came from? Wouldn’t it create more panic if word of it leaked out?”
Screwdriver smiled. “Actually, if I were you and I’d found a gun, I’d lie, because I wouldn’t be sure whom I could trust. No knowing who shot the Body.”
I stared at Screwdriver, waited for some wink or twitch telling me that he and I were somehow still tethered, but no sign came. My trust of him, founded on nothing, grew. Of all of us in the room, he and I thought the most alike. Yellow was the strange gap. Closer to me in age but inexplicable in his misunderstanding and lack of patience.
I was good at lying to myself. Always had been. “In any event, I haven’t found a gun.” It weighed down my jacket, probably about to rip through my pocket and thud to the floor.
Seventy waved us away. “Take him upstairs. Get it done.”
Yellow swallowed his remaining argument and turned to the dark hall. “Come on.” He waited for me at the stairwell, his face painted in shadow. I tried to keep my face blank of any expression as I passed. Before I could go through the door, he grabbed my arm and squeezed. “I don’t know what you did, but if I find that you’ve ruined this.…”
“You’ll what?”
His threat hung in the air between us. I saw the realization in his face: He’d just threatened me, the one who was supposed to die. I wondered if he could recall the suspicion of him that had just bloomed in my head.
“I just don’t—” He let go of my arm. “I’m sorry. Look. It all gets very confusing. The paradoxes are coming constantly now. Little things set them off. It’s very unsettling. I have memories of this working so smoothly, of everything going as we had planned it. But now.… Everything seems so fucked up.”
I waited for him to say something else. His eyes appeared to lock onto something in the stairwell corner, but when I looked, there was nothing there. I said, “Are you done?”
He regarded me as if just remembering I was there. “Yes. Yes, I’m ‘done.’ ” His anger was back. “You know, it really is unfortunate it’s you who has to deal with this. It’s too bad it’s not someone older.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because from what I remember, at your age you don’t have the capacity to imagine what this is like for anyone but yourself. You don’t really grasp the full scope of what’s happening. You’re still too much of a selfish prick.”
I glanced down at my shadow, my hands shaking. “What is it that I didn’t understand in seeing the Body in there?”
Light fell on Yellow’s face. He was pale, his lips quivering. His hands shook, too. Both our hands shook. “That’s not just you in there. It’s me. It’s all of us. If the timeline follows the path we imagine it will, it’s not just you who will die. I’ll cease to be. So will they. The moment you fail, the moment you catch up with him, that might be it.” He gestured back toward the room we’d left, toward the Body. “Everyone older than you is terrified.”
My brain was slush. “How can it happen?” I asked. “How can you all even be here if …?”
“None of us know.”
He turned and took the stairs two steps at a time, his footsteps calling from farther and farther up. I watched my shadow on the stairwell floor. Cracks in the paint and mortar revealed the wire and the wooden studs behind the wall. I felt like that wall. My surface was shattered, and what was left behind barely held itself together. Yellow and the others saw my path leading to their destruction, but if I was right and I was no longer tethered to any of them, then it was only me who was going to die.
I followed Yellow up the steps.
By the time I found him on the fifth floor, I was exhausted and could think of nothing except sitting for a few minutes, but Yellow’s impatience kept me moving. Halfway down the hall, Yellow stopped and put his hand on a doorknob—Room 503. “You’ll want to see this,” he said. “Hurry. I need to get downstairs.”
He opened the door, and Yellow and I both squinted into the bright light that spilled out. The room was fully made up, as if the hotel were still functioning and not close to collapse. Three lights blazed—one on the ceiling, a table lamp near the bed, and a floor lamp. Above the neatly made bed was a painting of the ocean. Poorly done. The windows were curtained instead of papered over. The wallpaper, old and worn, had been mended in places with what looked like packing tape. It showed yellow flowers, peonies, layered one atop another, ceiling to floor. The room had a warm, sunlit glow.
On the dresser, next to an unused ashtray, sat a large plastic key ring. I walked to the side table and opened a drawer. A Bible and two pens rattled at the bottom. I touched the wallpaper, toyed with the taped patches. Up close the walls were the worse for wear, the paper faded and stained by please-don’t-think-about-it. The bed’s baseboard was banged up, and the nearby chair was dented along the edges. The room was shabby. It was also carefully staged, manicured as best as it could be, and smelled of ammonia and furniture wax. The rug was stained but vacuumed.
I tried to swallow. “Are there any other rooms like this?”
Yellow seemed afraid to cross the threshold. “No.” He stood in the hallway, hands in pockets. He appeared older than I’d originally thought. And more tired. “Look in the closet,” he said.
“What’s in the closet?”
“Open it and find out.”
“You’re being childish.”
Yellow shook his head. “I disagree. I think you’re being childish.”
The closet door was massive. I took hold of the cold crystal knob and turned it. The knob came off in my hand. As if it were a bloody knife, I dropped it. From inside the closet came a clattering as the knob on the other side fell to the floor.
“Are you kidding me?” Yellow joined me as I tried to fit the knob’s shaft back into the hole. “This didn’t happen when Seventy showed me.”
“Don’t come unhinged,” I said. “It’s only a knob.”
“Only a knob?” He was sweating and rubbed at his temples. I pulled out my flask and offered it to him. He accepted it, started to take a drink, then stopped himself and handed the flask back to me. As I drank, he knelt down to work the doorknob into place. I drank half of what was left and repocketed it, exploring the rest of the room as he tinkered. The dresser drawers were empty. As I bent to look beneath the bed, the gun in my pocket swung and knocked against my side. I’d forgotten it was there. No I hadn’t. How could I? All it did was let me know it was there. The whiskey warmed in my stomach.
At last Yellow stood. “There. Now. Open the door.”
“You open it. You’re right next to it.”
His face flushed. “Just open the damn door.” He stepped out of the way, back to the hall where he’d hidden in plain sight before, as if the threshold gave him protection from whatever was inside. He shrank by the moment, as if his hair were thinning and graying while I watched. He seemed consumed by his yellow sweater, almost comical, a man in a large, limp banana suit.
I turned the knob hard and pulled. Inside the closet was a television atop a small cart. Cables spilled from the back, some connecting to a videotape player, others connecting to a small silver camera on a tripod stand. It was a decades-old mini–tape recorder. Sometimes decrepitude doesn’t inhibit function. The entire contraption leaned into the corner, lens aimed up over my head, open-irised. I knelt to take a closer look. The television was thirteen inches, flat-screened. Scratches on the floor showed how often the cart had been wheeled forward. I plugged the cord into a nearby outlet and turned on the set, which popped to blue-lit life, its speakers emitting a low hiss. When nothing else happened, I tapped the up and down channel buttons. Nothing. I stood to examine the back of the set. There was no antenna. I returned the set to its original input, which I assumed was the camera. A cable lay on the closet floor, and I connected it to the TV. A small red light appeared on the camera, and the blue TV screen turned to gray, INPUT 1 visible in the corner.
I pressed “play.”
On the screen appeared the bed behind me. The perspective was from just inside the closet, as if it had been shot from exactly where the camera stood now. I sat down on the bedspread’s black-and-red floral print and waited for something to appear on-screen. Just as I was beginning to fear that the video would prove to be a long study of the rose-printed bedspread, a figure crossed in front of the camera. It was me, older, growing a beard, still in the same suit. He was harrowed by exhaustion, more done in than the Body. He sat on the bed and faced the camera, and so I found myself staring into my own face. Looking at another me was like looking into a mirror that didn’t cast a reflection in reverse, as it ought to. It occurred to me that I was more used to seeing myself like that than in an actual mirror, that the collection of me that filled the hotel was a series of broken mirrors moving among themselves, hoping to find the one that worked properly, that produced a vision of what was true. I rubbed elbows with my own vanity.
Video me pulled a brown paper bag toward him and rummaged through it, removed a bottle of whiskey. The bag dropped to the floor, and he kicked it under the bed. Corpse-still, bottle on his lap, he stared at me from inside the set.
I glanced down at my own foot. The edge of a brown paper bag was just visible by my heel. I reached beneath the bed and pulled the worn bag toward me. A half-full liter bottle of whiskey fell into my hand. Gifts arrive in many shades of amber, I thought. Beneath the whiskey was a small videotape, still in its wrapper. The right size for the video camera. I held it in my palm and looked back at the screen. Video’s bottle, now open, perched on his knee. He jerked his head toward the door. I took his signal and looked at the door.
Yellow watched me from the hall. If he could see, or had seen, the video, he made no move to reveal it. His face was screwed up with curiosity. Despite the questions I could see rattling in his head, he said nothing.
Video was waiting for me. I marveled at dark circles beneath his eyes. He gestured, urgent, waved a hand in the direction of the door as if saying, Go on, go ahead.
I turned back to Yellow. “Did you watch this?”
“Are you crazy? This place reeks of paradoxes. I never saw it before, so I shouldn’t have seen it now. Seventy didn’t even remember seeing any of this shit.”
“He didn’t?”
“Did I fucking slur my words? No. You probably shouldn’t have seen it either.”
“We’re not tethered. Don’t worry about it.”
“You still shouldn’t be watching.” He shifted away from the door. The rug, which looked dry, made a squishing sound beneath his feet.
“Why bring me here?”
Yellow’s hands fluttered. “Because Seventy said I should. I don’t know why.” His distress was somehow comforting.
On the screen Video raised his bottle to me, offered a silent toast. I opened mine in return and took a drink. I choked a little, and so did Video. I wondered if he might not be between me and the Drunk. His perspective was hard to place.
After Video drank, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the still-wrapped videotape, the one I held. He placed a finger to his lips and then pocketed it. I took another swig from the bottle and put the hard plastic cassette into my pocket. It clicked against the gun. At the door Yellow watched me.
I held the bottle out toward him. “Drink?”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re watching that.”
“Some good stuff on here.” I hoped my bravado was thicker than it felt. “It’s a bit racy.”
“You would know.”
I gulped whiskey through a smile. “Yes I would.” I’d pissed him off.
On the closet television, Video toasted me once more. I was near the bottom of the bottle when he reached the halfway mark and recapped. He wrapped the bottle in the brown bag, took a pen from his pocket and wrote across the front of the bag, tightened the wrap, then shoved it under the bed, where I had found it moments earlier. I turned the bag over. I hadn’t noticed the writing the first time; the script was so small and the pen so light against the brown paper.
It read, “In case of emergency, break glass.”
I finished the bottle, recapped it, and stuck it into my jacket’s inner pocket. Between the loaded gun, the microvideotape, and the empty whiskey bottle, I was gathering a heavy little collection.
To no one, myself, everyone, I said, “Okay, enough of this. Let’s get out of here.”
“You’re drunk.” Yellow stood off from the doorway, hidden in the dark.
I stood and did my best not to fall. “Not fully.” The whiskey had been effective. I was drunk.
He said, “You’re chewing the inside of your cheek.” It was a technique I’d learned to sober myself.
I couldn’t see Yellow’s face in the shadows. The room tilted around me a little. “I need a bathroom.”
He pointed behind me. The bathroom door was ajar, and the white tile looked cool and inviting. I hesitated. At the door Yellow continued to hover. I suddenly feared that he’d known more than he let on, and I wanted to get away from him. I’d been too cavalier in watching the tape. Video had known that Yellow was in my doorway, but I still didn’t like it. It was possible that Video and I were tethered, that he was on the right side of the Body and still connected to me. I both hoped and feared that was the case.
I said, “Listen, you can go.”
“No, that’s fine. I can wait.”
“You want to hear me puke? Is that it? Relive old times?” He didn’t move. “Is there something else?”
“What do you mean?”
“Another room? Some other thing I don’t know about? You said this was it.”
“Then fuck off.”
His face twitched. I couldn’t recall ever talking to an Elder like this. In the past I’d felt anger toward Elders, given myself the pleasure of horrible fantasies about my older selves, then felt some embarrassment later when I approached those ages and saw certain glimmers in Youngsters’ eyes. But this was different. A simple expletive and I felt so much better. Untethered or not, I wouldn’t feel guilty about that.
Yellow stepped away from the door and called back to me, “You’re on your own now. Good luck, you drunk piece of shit.”
Self-loathing ran in both directions, I realized. I could hate both who I had been and who I would become. It was efficient.
When he was gone, I moved quickly to the closet to eject the tape from the machine, then crushed it between my heel and the bathroom floor. The spool unwound, spiraled across the white tiles. There might have been more on the tape, but I relied on Video’s knowing that I prematurely smashed it. I gathered the plastic shards and flushed them down the toilet. Before I could put the second tape into the camera, I heard a squish of footsteps in the hallway. I stowed the tape and returned to the bathroom, made a grand show of it—ran the water, splashed my face, soaked my hair and slicked it back, gargled loudly, spit louder, turned off the water, and flushed the toilet a second time—before I left the bathroom.
The woman from the ballroom was standing in the doorway. “Always have to slip out, don’t you?” She gave me a conspirator’s smile. Her face made me forget the worried frenzy of the evening, among other things.
I tried to give my own conspiratorial smile in return but felt a lecherous grin lock onto my face. It wouldn’t let go. “I think I’m starting to hate crowds.” Just then the floor shook with thunder, and I imagined that I could feel the music from the ballroom bumping its way up through the superstructure.
She crossed the room. Her bright eyes were lined with dark makeup that made them stand out even more than I’m sure they normally would. Her dress was a complicated silk arrangement—red waves emerged and disappeared. A split seam ran up one thigh, and it flashed at me once, twice, I prayed for a third as she crossed to the foot of the bed and sat down. She turned and looked over her shoulder. The parrots tattooed there spoke to me.
I wiped my hands on the towel I held. I didn’t remember picking it up, but nothing comes from nothing, so there you go. I sat beside her. There wasn’t much room, but she didn’t move away.
“I was just washing my face. It gets pretty hot in that ballroom,” I told her.
She nodded, quiet, as if trying to recall something. Her eyes roamed the ceiling. I got the feeling that she knew all my answers even though I hadn’t heard her questions. We both faced the open closet, the blank television screen. I wished I had shut that door, even though she acted as if she’d seen it all before.
“What were you watching?” Her voice was silk scraping silk.
“Nothing, really.” The unused tape in my pocket pressed heavily against my hip. It gave an embarrassing throb. “Just using the washroom.”
“Washroom.” She laughed. So many of her questions sounded like answers, and they all seemed to amuse her. Her voice dropped to an even silkier volume, so that I almost had to read her lips. “You were watching something about me, weren’t you?”
I couldn’t believe I’d destroyed the tape before watching to the end. Was it too late to retrieve the pieces from the plumbing and somehow reconstruct it?
She laughed as I blushed. I kept my mouth shut and let her lean in a bit closer, let her press a bare shoulder into mine. Her breath was sweet—from rum, I thought—and her hair smelled of flowers. I looked at the peonies on the wallpaper, faded and yellow, and tried to remember what peonies smelled like. She smiled at me. Her hand touched my knee, ran upward to my thigh. The gun, only an inch from her hand, seemed to pulse. She studied the lines of my jaw and neck, leaned in and touched my lips with hers. Our breaths mixed.
Her hands ran up my sides and drew me against her. She withdrew before I knew the kiss was over, and I watched her eyes harden as she leaned away. She examined my face. For just a moment, she ran her fingers over my cheek, up toward my temple and forehead, tender, as if caring for something only she saw. Her long nails sketched lightning trails on my skin that continued to vibrate even after her hand left my face. She pulled back my sleeve, and her fingers danced over the pale skin on my wrist. She smiled at it sadly, stood, and straightened her skirt. Red rose up her neck.
“That will make you follow me,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s important that you meet me and that you follow me.” She sounded like she was reciting a mantra.
“Why would your kissing me make me follow?” I sounded more accusing than I meant to. I saw a veil fall between us in her eyes.
“Because you’ve never been with anyone like me. That’s what you’ll say.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” My denial did nothing to dispel the truth of her comment. “Who invited you anyway?”
“No one yet.” Her lips continued to move after these words. She was still speaking, in a whisper I couldn’t understand. She stopped and tilted her head. For a moment she looked like one of the parrots tattooed on her shoulder, black eye watching me. Then her gaze fell on my lapel. “Your clock. Wrong time.” The color drained from her face, and I could practically hear her bird heart fluttering to escape her chest.
I stood and held out my hand. “Are you all right?”
She didn’t answer, just turned and walked from the room. The echo of her voice—“Wrong time, wrong time”—followed her out the door.
I trailed her down the hall, watching her avoid rips in the carpet and squeaky floorboards as if she’d walked these halls for years.
She approached the elevator, and I was about to sputter that she shouldn’t waste her time when she pulled open the grate and climbed in. She didn’t slam the door in my face, though this may be due to the door’s catching on a frayed edge of carpet. I smiled at her, kicked the door free of the carpet, and yanked it shut behind me. We both faced forward, toward the gate, and she cleared her throat.
“Can you press the button, please?”
I pressed the button, stammered an apology, and the elevator, which was apparently working again, began its creaky descent. The buttons in front of me wavered in and out of focus, and I wondered what might be wrong with them—something with the electricity, perhaps. Then I remembered the bottle of whiskey I’d just finished. The meatballs from earlier had cushioned its fall, but now it was settling into me and finding its way to my head.
The elevator clicked past four and three easily enough. Halfway between the second and first floors, it gave a whine and a shudder. The floor pitched forward as if we’d caught on something, and she fell into my back. We both hit the gate, me first, hard, and my hand slipped through a gap and slapped the slowly moving shaft wall. It was smooth and gray, and little cobwebs hung across its surface, clung to my hand and sleeve, dragged along behind my fingers. She pressed into my back. We hung against the gate like two bats, and the elevator shook again and stopped. The woman had righted herself and apologized for falling into me.
“I think we’ve got greater worries,” I said.
We were stuck between floors. Light poured in through the one-foot gap at our feet and threw our ankles’ shadows against the rear wall. Above a thick slab of concrete was the darkness of the second floor. Music and voices leaked upward from the first.
The woman squatted down into her heels, peered through the gap, and called for help. There was no answer.
She looked at me. “How are we going to get out of here?”
I burped a semisolid, wet, and sour burp, swallowed what I could, and coughed on the rest. When I could breathe again, I said, “How should I know?”
“You must have some recollection of our getting stuck in here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She stared at me as if realizing for the first moment that she was alone in an elevator with a man-shaped bag of feces. “Isn’t that a roomful of younger yous we’re listening to right now?”
“Oh, that.” I waved a hand, and much of my torso followed it. Finishing that bottle had been a big mistake. “No. Things haven’t been going according to memory tonight. Not for me. But even if I do remember this in a year, I’ll have to let it happen.”
“Why?”
“Rule number three.”
She smiled. She hadn’t smiled since the moment in the room when she thought I was someone older. “You and your rules.”
“You know my rules?” I didn’t tell people my rules. I didn’t tell people much of anything about me, assuming I even spoke to them at all.
“I know of them.”
“Ah.” This was a rather vague response, but as the car was swirling around me, it was all I could manage.
“So what do we do?”
I’d been in odd situations with women before, but this situation reverberated in a way that made me uncomfortable. I sat on the floor. The elevator hung at a nauseous angle.
The woman stared down at me, one hand against a wall. “I asked you, what do we do?”
I shut my eyes. The elevator stopped spinning briefly. I thought we might get away with staying there for a while, that she might understand that I needed to be still, to hide from everyone else. I don’t know why I had this fantasy—delusion, really—that she cared about my needs at all. She burst that impression by muttering, “I don’t want to die in this elevator.”
I opened my eyes. “What does that mean?”
“What?”
“Die in this elevator? Who are you, by the way? I can’t keep thinking of you as just ‘the Woman.’ ”
“The Woman?”
I waved a hand in the air to dispel her anger. She shook her head and looked up toward the ceiling, as if remembering something unpleasant. Her voice, sad and resigned, came from far away. “I’m Lily.”
“Lily. Nice to meet you.” I held out a hand, and she turned toward me just as I stole a glance at her breasts. Her green eyes pinned me against the wall. “How did you get here, Lily?”
She stopped to consider her own words. “I received an invitation.”
“Impossible. There are no invitations.”
“Not from you.”
I waited for her to continue. She didn’t. She understood me in a way that made me afraid. She knew I was weak and scared. She didn’t like it but accepted it nonetheless. I wondered when I would find her and how I would convince her to follow me to the party. Would she be familiar with me as an old man? Did I really have to wait that long, if I made it that long?
I fumbled with the elevator’s control panel beside the door but couldn’t even get it open. I gave up and squatted, thought about where I might get sick inconspicuously.
Lily parroted herself. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“Seriously, can’t we just rest a bit?”
“Get the fuck up and help me get this gate open.”
I stood and brushed myself off. Head swirling, I put one hand against the wall and tugged at the gate with the other. I noticed a clean spot on the tile floor where a powerful cleaning solution had stripped not only the dirt but the polish. Somehow I knew that it had been a bloodstain, cleaned with effort by an Elder. Screwdriver, most likely. He wore an air of shitwork. I sensed Lily’s eyes following mine to the floor, and I looked away. Would she panic if she knew that one of me would die in the car earlier that night?
I rattled the gate. It made a lot of noise but drew no attention. Conversation from the first floor didn’t stop, and the disco music seemed to grow louder. I rattled the gate again, and Lily put a hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s get the gate open.”
She used the spike of her heel to hook the lower latch and wrench it free of the catch. I held the bottom of the gate clear, and she worked at the upper latch, jumping to reach it. She leapt again and again, with a determination I might have never had in my entire life. In a way I didn’t care if I got out of the elevator. In just one heel, she fell into me several times. I ended up keeping a hand on her waist to steady her.
“I almost got it that time,” she said, face flushed and damp with sweat. She glanced down at my hand. I pulled it away.
She struck the latch again. It held as if welded shut. Unless someone came to open it for us, we were truly stuck. Lily knelt back down, put her head into the opening, and shouted. She screamed. She pleaded. The music grew louder.
“What are they all doing down there? How much time can someone spend with himself?”
She looked at me as if I should have the answer. After a moment I realized that maybe I should. “It’s a party. I like music. Loud music, apparently.”
“Has there ever been trouble like this with the elevator before?”
Before I could answer, there were voices above us. “Hold on. We’ll have you out in a second.” Someone forced open the second-floor door. I looked up past the legs and tried to see the face. The voices that carried down to us included some so high-pitched they must be prepubescent. They made my skin crawl. When would I be so stupid that I would bring children into this?
The alcohol rushed over me in waves. “Get something under that latch and pop it out.” The elevator seemed to shrink around me, and I wondered if it was conceivable that I had intentionally poisoned myself with the whiskey. I stumbled and fell against the wall.
Lily grabbed my arm. “You’re not well.”
“No. I’m fine.” I watched the youthful shadows over her shoulder. “Listen. Do me a favor. Don’t talk to them. All right?”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“They shouldn’t be here. I haven’t figured out how they all got here. Some are too young. I don’t know what they’re capable of.”
Her hard eyes softened a bit. “Right. Okay. Now, let’s try to get out of here.”
Who was she? She was handling this better than I was.
That was when the whiskey had its way with me. As the elevator car turned sideways and darkened in a frenzy of childish hands.