He woke in his clothes to the chittering AC, the silent TV on a documentary about insects. A black bug came halfway out of its lair and vibrated furiously, insane. The dim light of dawn leaked under the thin curtains, and he shuddered. The fact that he didn’t feel like he was in immediate danger of dying alerted him to the fact that he was still very drunk.
He turned the bedside light on and sat up, and after a few seconds his equilibrium followed suit. His head felt like a balloon on a string bobbing along behind the rest of him. At the bathroom sink, he scrabbled a plastic cup out of its wrap and drank several glasses of tap water. It tasted of punky minerals and the carcasses of small animals long decomposed; he imagined the hotel’s piping, never tended to, the rusting circulatory system leaking underground. His own heart rumbled sympathetically in his chest, and a sudden deep swell of dread forced him back to the bed for fear of blacking out, keeling over. He switched off the TV and sat there, trying to organize his thoughts or at the very least not run screaming from the room. He turned to the nightstand to make sure his keys and wallet had made it back with him. They had, which brought him a measure of comfort, however small. A piece of paper jutted from the wallet—a napkin with smudged lipstick on it and a name signed underneath, no number. The signature was executed with the loopy, swooning hand of a teenage girl and seemed like a stage prop; everything in the room did, in fact, and this sense of cardboard unreality made him nauseated. The sheets and even his own cold skin had a waxy artificial feel, and he couldn’t shake the sensation of being a figment of someone else’s awful imagination.
He closed his eyes, desperate to return to sleep and completely unable to do so. After a few minutes of writhing into his pillow, he got up and went outside. The pressure in his head and his general sense of impending calamity were minutely relieved by fresh air and motion, and so he shuffled barefoot, in widening circles, around the parking lot. The velvet indigo of night was just beginning to disintegrate into gray morning dusk, the unmagic hour. Another impossible day loomed ahead, like an iceberg sighted well in advance yet too late to avoid. Over the scrubby rank of pines to the east of the hotel, the sky was an unhealthy, sallow pink. Sailor take warning. The trees under it, adjacent to the highway, also looked ill, exhausted by exhaust. A sixteen-wheeler lumbered past, its Jacob Marleyish chains clanking, with a picture on the trailer of a mustachioed Italian chef rubbing his fingers together over a table full of toothsome dishes. The entire world, at that moment, truly seemed to him like a gigantic, unadulterated pile of shit.
Of course, it was he who was the pile of shit. He felt, in fact, that he was made of shit. Bullshit, dogshit, horseshit, ratshit, chickenshit. His mental and physical state constituted a sort of Pousse-Café of shit—an elaborate stratification of shit that commingled to create a shitty whole that was much shittier than the sum of its shitty parts. Immediate, automatic remorse was the greasy top layer of shit, which bubbled on top of the churning shit of his hangover, which was generously layered on top of the firmer soil bed of his bad health and drinking and desire for alcohol, which itself sat on top of untold, fossilized geological strata of guilt and fear, decades—a lifetime—of shit.
At the edge of the lot, near the access road and drainage culvert, lay the airport pickup sign, half wadded, with the LAZAR still legible. He bent slowly, allowing his head time to follow his body, and picked it up. The letters had been slide-ruled or something and meticulously colored in. At the base of the Z in his last name, a small slip of the pen had been covered several times with Wite-Out. Jesus Christ. He held the sign and looked at it for quite a while, trying to remember exactly what had happened.
The image of the kid speeding angrily away flashed through his head; it was succeeded by other snatches of the night before in a juddering stop-motion reel. It was a film he’d seen in varying versions hundreds, thousands, of times before, yet it never lost its power to mortify. What an asshole he was, what a joke. Vance’s sincerity and desire to do something worthwhile had somehow offended his own sense of self—if you feel your own life is meaningless, naturally everyone else should feel the same way. He was so tired of his own shit and so tired of heaping it on those unfortunate enough to cross his path, and he thought how just once it would be nice to improve rather than worsen another person’s life.
Back in the room, he pulled the manuscript from the trash. A phone number and address were printed, heartbreakingly hopeful, on the top of the thing. He dialed the number, got a robot voicemail, and hung up—at a loss for what to say or even why he was calling. He found ESPN on the TV and watched some hockey highlights, if such a thing could be said to exist. Figures glided gracefully to and fro across the white expanse, occasionally punching one another.
He picked up the phone again, and this time, an Indian-accented male voice answered. “Hello, front desk.”
“This is room 141.”
“Yes?”
“I need a favor from you.”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if you could bring me a beer or two.”
“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t have room service.”
“But could you maybe bring me a couple from somewhere? A convenience store nearby or something?”
“You want me to go to a convenience store at eight in the morning on a Sunday and get you beer.”
“I’ll pay you forty bucks.”
“Hold on.” There was a sound of muffled rummaging. “As it turns out, we have a couple in our employee fridge. Room service will bring them right over.”
The clerk appeared with two Coors Light cans dangling from a plastic yoke, and Richard handed him two twenties, ignoring the sheepish look on the man’s face. Why should the clerk feel guilty? he thought as he drained the first beer. It was the best forty bucks he’d ever spent. Twenty a can? He would have gladly paid a hundred, a thousand.
Becalmed by the beer and a related but distinct sense of purpose, he tried Vance’s number again. Again it went right to voicemail, the number he’d dialed repeated back agonizingly slow by the computerized female voice, as though she could somehow sense what an idiot he was. He looked back at the painting, then down at the manuscript in his lap. Though an idiot he was, he was not unaware that his urge to apologize to the kid—to put things right, or rightish, or righter than they were now at any rate—had something to do with the conversation he’d had with Cindy, which he could remember virtually none of, yet was absolutely sure had been bad. This certainty stemmed partly from the fact that he hadn’t had a good conversation with her in twenty years but mainly from the feeling he got in his stomach when he thought about the phone call. A lifetime of interrogating himself the morning after, investigating these little shudders and cold spots in his gut, told him it had been very, very bad. Talking to Cindy, of course, was not an option—like Vance, she wouldn’t answer the phone—unlike him, she possessed the distinct advantage of living a thousand miles away.
“Vance,” he started and stopped, struck by the insufficiency of a rambling, voicemailed apology. “Never mind. I’ll see you soon.”
Pulling a thin phone book from the nightstand, finding the number for a cab company, he asked himself why it mattered. It didn’t, nothing did. Nonetheless, he showered. Nonetheless, he put on fresh clothes. Nonetheless, he stood outside with his bag until the battered green taxi came into view.
Twenty minutes later, the cab dropped him in front of a small house set so far back into the nearby woods it looked like it was in the witness protection program. He set his suitcase by the mailbox and trudged up a long, cracked driveway. Finally making the front stoop, he paused for the requisite five minutes or so it took him to catch his breath after engaging in any manner of physical activity, then he rang the doorbell. A black-and-yellow wolf spider duly emerged from its woolen hidey-hole overhead in the space between the wall and drainpipe, but no human answered. He pressed the button again, and the kid appeared, hair askew and cheek striped with sleep lines.
“How did you find me?” said Vance.
He held up the manuscript. “Look, I’m sorry about last night.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. I was a real asshole. I am a real asshole, I continue to be. I persist in my assholery.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me what I can do to make it up to you.”
Vance shrugged, narrowing his already narrow shoulders, further caving in his sunken chest.
“I’m going to read this. I’ll let you know what I think.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
They stood there for a minute. It felt remarkably similar to arguing with one of his ex-wives, the sense that there was some magical combination of words and feigned contrition that would make her unmad at him. The kid took off his glasses and rubbed the side of his face with his palm. Richard said, “It does matter.”
“That’s not what you were saying last night.”
“Hence my apology.”
“Say it again.”
“What?”
“That it matters. I don’t just mean my book—I know it’s probably pretty bad. But I’m trying, you know?”
“I know.”
“It’s not all worthless and it’s not all bullshit. Your books matter to me. It matters.”
Vance’s long face stared ahead, across the yard and tree line past the road. In the sky, the sun sat half mount and recalcitrant red, as though it had just barely been talked into rising and was already reconsidering the wisdom of doing so. Still, it rose. There was a long unknowable day ahead, and Richard felt himself ineffably touched by the kid’s hope, even if it wasn’t a hope he shared. “Okay, it matters.”
Vance seemed to process this, still watching the sunrise. The inside of the house—a split stairway that led up and down both ways into darkness—gloomed out at the dawning day, absorbing the sunlight. Or perhaps it was the day reaching into the depths of the house; for a moment, the kid seemed pitched in a kind of equilibrium between the two. He said, “Good.”
“Anything else,” said Richard.
“Yeah, let me go with you.”
“What?”
“You asked how you can make it up to me. That’s how.”