There was nobody in the little booth of the reception.
The room stood empty and quiet in the pinkish light from a corner lamp, the bar shut up.
Outside the first shade of pale was showing above the horizon.
A man was half lying against the wall in the street and when he saw me come out of the door he rolled toward me and said something in a slurred voice and I turned away and began to walk quickly toward the light of the main street where there were cars, those odd early-morning cars, early risers, the first commuters, and where soon there would be people and the opening of bakeries and maybe I could get a little food.
In my head I wrote, over and over, the first few lines of a letter which was a letter to Cal. Began it and then stopped.
There wouldn’t have been any point.
Out on the main street the lights made the beginning of the dawn go away, made it impossible to see.
A corner shop was taking a delivery from the open back of a truck and two men pushed at a tall cage-like cart and it rattled on concrete and they swore and pulled at it when it hit the curb, and there was the quiet chinking of the bottles which sat in the cage of the cart in cardboard boxes.
A white light was on in the window of the little shop.
One of the men was staring at me and he said something to the other and they both turned and looked at me for a long time with hard looks and my spine tingled and I turned and began to walk quickly away from them in the other direction.
I thought, A cafe, I need some service place to sit quiet and warm and safe while the sun comes up and then I can know where I’m going.
A red car pulled up beside me and a man leaned out of the window.
He said, “Need a place to sleep, sweet?”
He had graying hair and his nose disfigured his face.
I kept walking.
For a while the car crawled along behind me and every now and again he would call something out.
Eventually he snickered and I heard the acceleration of the engine as he drove past me and away.
I tried to imagine my mother living here in this city and when I imagined my mother as my age I imagined her as me, which happened because it was impossible for me to imagine her as herself.
I pictured her walking down a lightening road.
There was a gas station on the corner of the main street and it had a forecourt lit up with white and blue lights, which were fixed blockish on cables overhead.
Inside there was a cafeteria and it was open and there were long plastic tables and I bought a coffee and sat down at one.
I wondered whether Cal would try to find me.
I didn’t see how he would be able to.
Maybe he had woken up early the way he sometimes did, and so maybe he would already know by now that I had gone.
He might think in the beginning that I had just gone down to the front room of the inn or something. He would lie there for a while and I thought he would try to come up with reasons and explanations for where I might be, and then after a while he would realize that I had gone and that I wasn’t coming back at least in his foreseeable future and that I had left him.
That would be new to him.
I wondered if my absence would destroy him.
I thought it wouldn’t.
He was not someone who could ever relinquish himself enough for a word as powerful as destruction.
I wondered where I thought I was going to go, because it couldn’t be San Padua now, I couldn’t go back there.
A car pulled up on the forecourt and a man got out and went into the shop next door and I heard the automatic doors when he came in, and then a moment later he walked back across the forecourt. In his arms there were two packets of potato chips and two bottles of water.
A small face was in the passenger seat of the car. I saw her as he drove away past the window, a little girl, eating a bag of potato chips.
The father and the girl looked tired.
And for a moment I felt it too, an ache to be tired and driving in the car in the early morning with a father, who was also tired, both of us eating potato chips which smelled of rich dog food, and drinking cold bottled water.
I stared at the tabletop.
It had a rough surface and there were small spots of gray on it which were the pattern on the plastic.
It was the same as the tabletops that had been in my school. For part of my life I had looked at tabletops like them and drawn on them. I had liked drawing fish. I was good at it. There weren’t many things I could draw well from my imagination but for some reason I used to draw those fish all the time over everything and I had a sort of template of steps that I followed in my head of the exact way in which they had to be drawn.
In school my teachers told me I was clever. A teacher called Mrs. Romero had taken a special interest in me. She had worn these purple reading glasses and her hair had been dyed blond and she was in her fifties, late fifties, something like that, so presumably under the dye it was gray.
She had a small plastic man sitting on her desk.
The man was yellow and he was holding a plastic sign.
The sign said:
MAKE TODAY ANOTHER SUNNY DAY!
I had stared at that sign every morning for two years.
I breathed out.
Sooner or later I was going to have to decide where to go.