Gary Wilensky’s white Lincoln screeches toward the exit of the Sheraton parking lot. On Wolf Road, he can turn left or right.
Soon the police will be alerted about a perp in a white Lincoln; an ambulance will race to assist two victims attacked in the Sheraton parking lot. In the meantime, a heap of shopping bags, gifts he might have planned to give her, wait in his Sheraton hotel room. His name is posted in the reservation book. More bags, stuffed with items he’d checked off his lists, fill his car.
GLASSES
SCISSORS
NIGHT MASK
SEXY NIGHTWEAR
He was there and so was she, and then she wasn’t. She is behind him in the parking lot and he is moving away from her. But in which direction? South toward Manhattan, where the TV he left on casts his studio in the gray-blue light of midnight programming, or north toward the cabin, where the relics of a botched plan are all still about?
PULLEY
CHAIN
EXTENSION CORDS
Left or right. Right or wrong. Are there only two options in the end, and which is more right or less wrong? Which way is home? Straight ahead, across both lanes of Wolf Road, a sign for the Turf Hotel calls to him. He can cross the street in his white Lincoln and start over.
Around midnight, the lobby of the Turf is quiet. A lone night attendant greets Gary under a sleepy haze of artificial light. News travels slowly along Wolf Road, and the frenzy that took place across the street moments ago might as well have happened in another dimension.
“Joseph Jeffery,” he tells the desk clerk who asks for his name. The bills, still wadded in his pocket, peel away.
A new hotel room, a new bed draped by a new patterned blanket. He takes the phone off the hook. He riffles through his duffel bag—a clown sack of costumes and surprises he’d collected for this night.
Outside in the ragged, dried-out bushes behind the hotel parking lot, he shakes out another bag of belongings, leaving a trail of his intentions to be discovered in a matter of hours by a man walking his dog.
CLOTHING
BAG FOR HEAD
KINKY
Back in his car, he turns the key and the engine hums alive. His eyes are open, but he can’t see. The order of things—the carved-out parking lot path that leads to the main road—grows fainter.
His wheels thump over a grassy curb toward the entrance to Wolf Road. He is almost there when the alarm goes off again—the spurt of a wild, angry siren. Red and blue lights heat the interior of his car.
Behind him, a traffic inspector has spotted a white Lincoln with its headlights off, bowling over the curb. The car matches the description of an alert sent over the radio earlier in the evening. It is nearing one in the morning when the traffic inspector turns on his siren and follows the car down Wolf Road.
Gary drives a few hundred feet and turns right at the sign for Calico Corners, pulling into the parking lot, which curves around the back of the unlit fabric store and comes to a dead end. The police car stops behind him.
He is overlooking a marshy swampland. There is nothing ahead of him but the reflection of an odd-shaped moon, just a skin-peel away from being complete. Inside his car, there are no more bags. The wheelchair sits in the Sheraton parking lot. The rest is scattered in brambles and inside two hotel rooms. Even that Smith & Wesson is behind the parking lot of the Turf Hotel. Only the rifle is with him.
The car parked behind him shines a spotlight on the last scene: a desperate, wild, hand-waving debate between Gary Wilensky and Gary Wilensky and Gary Wilensky. The brake pedal is stamped down with the anxiety of group indecision.
Next, a small cannon boom is swallowed whole.
“He shot himself!” the officer screams, slamming a car door, releasing a barking dog who runs toward the white Lincoln. “He shot himself!”
Gary Wilensky is dead, but another Gary Wilensky—Gary the escape artist, Gary the practical joker, Teflon Gary, one of them or all—releases the brake pedal. The white Lincoln screeches forward and skates a hundred feet over the side of the parking lot toward the scalped moon.
Fragments of Gary Wilensky are shaken loose as the wheels hit the mud and sink into the marsh. Two officers, a dog, and a cameraman charge through the marshland and open the door. Inside, Gary’s knob knees are splayed apart, a gun between them, and his mangled head leans on the headrest, turned in the direction of the empty passenger seat.