The ring woke Lyle at last.
“Dr. Martin?”
“Right.”
“This is the front desk.”
“Okay, got it. What time is it?”
“Eleven fifty. We rang at ten, then knocked and then finally—”
“In the what?”
“What?”
“Morning or night?” It was completely dark in the room, the curtains pulled tight.
“Morning. Are you . . . are you okay, sir?”
“Yes. Thanks for the call.”
Lyle started to set the phone on the cradle. He pulled it back.
“One more question, young lady.”
“Of course. We’re here to help.”
“Where am I?”
“Steamboat. Springs. The Sheraton. Are you sure . . .”
Lyle, the phone now nestled between his left shoulder and his chin, had stopped listening. He ran his hands over the undershirt on his chest and down over his hips, feeling for sensation. The woman on the phone had asked something about whether he wanted coffee or orange juice delivered to the room. She sounded worried about him. “Coffee,” he said, and he reached over and set the phone in its cradle.
He closed his eyes and studied his dull headache. Was he sick? Maybe he’d just overslept. Maybe he’d dipped too deep this time into the over-the-counter sleeping medication. His kingdom for the prescription pad back.
Wasn’t he here for a conference? He swung his legs off the side of the bed and fought a wave of nausea. It was brief. He steadied himself. He felt another symptom, a sore of some kind inside his mouth, on his tongue. He ran his finger along its right side and could feel it was raw, like he’d bitten it. He lay there, exploring these odd sensations in his body, exhaustion but it felt like more than that. Less than five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Lyle stood and pulled open the curtains, which were vertically striped with brown and gray, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t just light but bright white, new snow white. Now he pictured arriving at the hotel, late at night, or early in the morning, in the cold. He’d gone right to bed. The small room, with quaint accents, spoke to what he figured must be precious real estate here on the edge of the ski mountain.
He opened the door to discover a woman in a smart gray pantsuit. She held a silver coffee tray in her arms but awkwardly so, and she had no name tag. At that moment, Lyle correctly deduced she wasn’t a bellhop or waiter bringing room service. She must be a manager, Lyle thought, from the way she looked past him and into the room.
“I’m fine,” he said, “much better now that I’ve got coffee.”
“On the house,” said the woman. “May I bring it inside?”
“Sure,” he said. Let her knock herself out. Over the last few years, as he’d had more to drink and taken more pills to sleep, he’d grown accustomed to friends and family occasionally peeking in. It was funny, in a way, the way they’d always walk into his studio apartment on Divis and look around as if they were somehow looking around his liver for spots.
She put the tray with the coffee decanter and newspaper on the nightstand beneath a lamp with a wide-brim opaque oval shade. Lyle watched the room through her eyes as she scanned his jeans on the floor, and the suitcase left near the foot of the bed, the bedspread strewn. The woman, trying to look nonchalant, glanced at the darkened mouth of the bathroom.
“Do you need to use it?” Lyle asked.
“No, I—”
“Just kidding. May I ask, do you know which floor the I.D. conference is on?”
“Conference?”
“Sorry, infectious disease.”
She straightened. “I don’t think . . .” She paused. “We had an orthopedist conference last week, y’know, the guys who help the skiers and their knees, but I don’t think we have anything this week. I could be wrong, or maybe the event is at a different hotel?” She ended it with a kind of question mark, as if she had somehow made a mistake.
Lyle thanked her and watched her go. He looked at his invite, which suggested he had the right place. Had he written down the date wrong or misunderstood it? That wouldn’t be unlike him, he realized. He’d really sunk the last few months. That’s why he’d wanted to come out here and try, at least, to restart. Maybe it just wasn’t to be. How could he have made a mistake like that?
For some reason, each time he reached for an answer, he found himself humming the words from a song. It was Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” which talks of a man losing faith and getting up and finding “a reason to believe.” In the last year, after a beer or two, Lyle would watch the video on YouTube of a concert from Germany where Springsteen had crushed it. Lyle kept the video bookmarked and now, for some reason, he couldn’t get it out of his head.
He looked down at the newspaper, Steamboat Today. The main story had to do with a prediction that El Niño would mean a glorious wet winter for the mountain town. This qualified here for front-page news. At the bottom of the page, a teaser about a shootout in Oregon caught Lyle’s attention. He turned to page 3 to read about this, yet another, tragedy: a group of separatists had killed three federal marshals before being beaten back in a massive gun exchange. Inside the group’s compound, police found a cache of weapons that one official described as “rivaling that of the Portland police force.” There were plans the group had tried to shred, but failed, that showed alliances with groups in two other states, Idaho and Minnesota, partly over grievances with the appointment of federal judges that group professed to dislike.
Lyle closed the paper. Maybe he was better off in retirement; the frickin’ human race.
Twenty-four hours later, Lyle landed back in San Francisco. He felt for the most part bewildered. He also wondered if his use of all those sleeping pills and the recreational booze had truly begun to eat away at his cognition.
Back in his studio apartment, he listened to the sounds of twentysomethings eating barbecue on the patio across the street and vowed he’d stop drinking for a day or two. He unpacked what little he’d taken. Put the Nebraska album on his old turntable and sat down on a beanbag chair, trying to shake the feeling he’d been put through the spin cycle in a dryer. It would go away in a few hours, he told himself, looking to put the whole damn failed experiment of going to Colorado behind him.
That’s when he found the note in his back pocket.