Robert Wilson - Gypsies

She moved across the faded plush hotel carpet slowly, hearing the creak of her own frail bones in the silent darkness.

In the morning they checked the phone book, but there was no Timothy Fauve listed anywhere in the Bay Area.

“Means nothing,” Laura said. “He could be using another name. Anything.”

But, Karen thought, it wasn’t a good omen.

After breakfast they drove to the address on the postcard Tim had mailed home.

It was a hotel in the Mission District. It was a boarding hotel, not the kind of hotel Karen was accustomed to; a derelict hotel, and there were homeless men squatting on the pavement outside. It was called the Gravenhurst, the name printed on an ancient rust-flecked sign. Karen gazed up at it with dismay. It was not the kind of place she could imagine going into.

But she followed Laura up the three chipped concrete steps to the door, Michael close behind her.

The lobby was dark and smelled faintly of mildew and sour hops. There was a barroom off to the right, a desk to the left. Laura stood at the desk and asked about Timothy Fauve. The man behind the desk was hugely overweight and seemed never to blink. He peered up at Laura and said he’d never heard the name. Laura said, “He was here at Christmas last year.”

“People come through here a lot.” “Maybe you could look it up?”

The man just stared at her.

Laura opened her purse and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “Please,” she said.

Karen was impressed. She couldn’t have done anything like that. It just wouldn’t have occurred to her.

The man sighed and paged back through a huge, old-fashioned ledger. Finally he said, “Fauve, Room 215. But he checked out months ago.”

Laura said, “You remember him?”

“What’s to remember? He was quiet. He came and went.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

“I don’t talk.”

Laura seemed to hesitate. “Is the room empty now?”

“Currently,” the man said, “that room is not occupied.”

“Can we look at it?”

“It looks like any other room. It’s been empty since May. We had a water pipe break.”

“Just for a few minutes?” She took another ten out of her purse.

The man put it in his breast pocket. “If you so desire,” he said, and passed her the key.

But he was right, Karen thought. There was nothing to see. Just this long, dank stucco corridor; a wooden door with a lock and a handle; an empty room.

It was a cubicle. It was the size of a walk-in cupboard. There was a toilet stall behind a cracked door, a washstand but no shower. The walls were covered with gray plaster. The broken pipe had flooded the rug and mold was eating its way toward the door.

Michael said, “He lived here?”

“At least for a while,” Laura said.

“He couldn’t have been doing too well.”

“We don’t know why he was here,” Laura said. “We don’t know anything about him, really. We all lost track of him when he left home. But he was in this room—I can feel it.”

Karen looked sharply at her sister.

“Things happened here,” Laura said. “He traveled from here. It leaves traces.”

“Traveled out of the world,” Karen said.

“Yes.”

She tried to feel it herself. It had been years since she had even allowed herself to believe such a thing was possible. But surely there was no point denying it now? She strained at the blank, empty volume of the room, trying to find a magic in it.

There was nothing.

If I could ever do that, she thought, I can’t anymore.

She said, “Do you know where he went?”

Laura sighed.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

Defeated, they moved silently through the lobby. Laura dropped the room key on the desk; the clerk didn’t look up. Stepping outside, Karen shaded her eyes against the light, suddenly alarmed.

There was a man leaning up against the car.

He was only a little taller than Karen, and too thin, but he was reasonably well dressed. A starched white shirt and a pair of fresh Levi’s. His eyes were narrow and his lips were set in a smile. Hands in his pockets. He looked up, and his face was pale in the sunlight.

For a moment she failed to recognize him. And then the recognition, when it did dizzy.

Laura cried out, “Tim!” The man’s smile widened. “Looking for me?” he said.

They drove to Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch.

“You should let me show you around,” Tim said. “Do the tourist thing.”

Karen liked the restaurant. The waitress brought seafood in rich, buttery sauces; and out beyond the big windows she could see San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The clouds lifted and a bright winter sun glanced from the tour boats lined up at the dock.

Laura said, “But we’re not tourists. We don’t have time.”

“Well, maybe you do,” Tim said. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think.” “How did you find us?”

“I looked.” Karen heard the subtle emphasis on “looked.” He added, “And I knew you were looking.” “You can do that?” He nodded.

But this wasn’t the place to talk about it. Karen ate methodically, not much conscious of her food, stealing glances at her brother. His clothes looked good. He was healthy enough. But then why had he been living in a Skid Row hotel less than a year ago? Something was going right for him… but Karen noticed a faint, persistent tic tugging at the corner of his right eyelid and wondered whether something might also be going wrong.

Tim turned to Michael, who had ordered the Seafood Monterey when a thorough search of the menu failed to turn up any kind of burger. “Must be strange, discovering an uncle after all these years.”

Michael shrugged. Michael had been quiet all morning. Quiet but attentive.

“A little,” he said.

Tim said, “We should get together and have a talk sometime.”

“Sure,” Michael said.

And Karen felt a stab of uneasiness.

“Home,” Tim said. “That’s where I’ve been.”

After lunch Laura drove to an extremity of parkland overlooking the bay. They sat in the car with the windows up and Karen watched a line of gulls wheeling down toward the water. It was quiet here and they were alone.

Laura said, “I take it you don’t mean Polger Valley.”

Tim laughed, and Karen was suddenly reminded of the old days: this derision. “Is that what you call home? Did it ever feel like home? Be honest.”

“Mama and Daddy admitted a few things,” Laura said.

Tim said, “Well, how about you tell me what you know.”

So Laura told him what they had found out from Willis and Jeanne: about their natural parents, about the Gray Man. And Karen repeated the part Willis had told her—the shack on the country road outside Burleigh and the bodies he had discovered in it.

Tim listened intently; he was frowning when Karen finished. He shook his head. “I was aware of some of that from other sources. But it fills in some gaps.”

Laura said, “You knew?”

“I was told.”

“Since when?”

“Well, recently.”

“Who told you—the Gray Man?”

The words seemed to hang in the cool air and for a moment Karen could hear the cry of the gulls.

Tim said, “Obviously I should start at the beginning. You want the long or the Reader’s Digest version?”

Laura glanced back at Michael for a fraction of a second and said, “I think the short.”

Tim was sitting up front with Laura, and Karen could only see the back of him, his profile when he turned, but she was watching him as closely as she could, relearning the look of him and trying to pinpoint what had changed. She remembered the sullen child in Mama’s photographs. But he wasn’t sullen now. He was, if anything, too effusive. Karen thought, Sometimes he talks like a salesman.