Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“ Amor ,” the Bellboy murmurs, ringed by a smoky fog as if he is swinging a censer, like an altar boy in a surplice of incense. “ Amor ,” and a voice behind the door answers, “ Amen.”

“More? I’ll give you what I got, just stop dinging that bell,” Old Martin says into the water glass. He unclasps his change purse and extracts the rosary he was saving to braid through his fist. What use is a rosary now that the coin he was saving to light a vigil candle has been stolen? On his side of the door, Martin inserts the cross like a key into the keyhole, and works the beads out behind it.

The Bellboy drops to his knees and cups his hands. If not a miracle, then a rosary worming from a keyhole is, at least, a metaphor. A rosary begins and ends with a cross. Fingertips trace the beads as if treading the Via Dolorosa from one Station of the Cross to the next. Even in fog you can’t be lost once you understand the journey takes you from Station to Station. The Bellboy puts his lips to the keyhole and whispers, “ Gracias.” With his ear beside the keyhole listening for a reply he can hear a muffled bong of clappers, a window imploding, and the thud of a body reeling against the walls. The bells of St. Martin de Porres, the looted church across the street, haunted by a priest said to have hanged himself after being accused of molestation, are tolling.

Kneeling beside the broken water glass, Old Martin, his head pounding apart with each concussion, plugs his ears. On the back stairs the Bellboy has arrived at another Station of the Cross: the Maid, scourged, her throat peeled back like sliced liver. When he covers her with his velvet jacket and braids the rosary into her hair, the severed hand beside her opens to offer him a coin. He would refuse it were it not stamped with his face on one side and a cross on the other. Shivering, his guts cramped, he carries her down the stairs into the furnace room where he sleeps, and slides the spike into his vein, and nods back against the furnace, which clangs through the corroded pipes.

When Old Martin regains consciousness the fog has settled in his chest. Blood is crusted around his nostrils and ears. His battered cardboard suitcase sits unopened on a chair. An envelope has been slipped under his door, a message from the Desk Clerk: Will he be paying the bill for another night?

Better answer yes, Martin thinks, I don’t have long, but this might take more time than I figured. He draws the shade like pulling down the night.

Since the Maid vanished and the Bellboy has stopped answering the bell, the Desk Clerk doesn’t sleep. Maybe they’ve absconded together. On top of everything else the furnace has died and the plumbing is backed up, no doubt thanks to the bag lady in 1414—actually 1313 if the hotel allowed unlucky numbers. She claims disability but skates on her walker like a Roller Derby queen through the alleys at night and, contrary to hotel policy, sneaks in strays. The cat litter she’s been flushing down the toilet for years has turned to concrete and the hotel is constipated. His bowels feel like concrete, too. The Desk Clerk shakes the bottle of Pepto-Bismol as if he has the bag lady by the throat. He chug-a-lugs, then from the corners of his mouth licks what looks like rabid foam. He was told that when he was a child with a stomachache he called the medicine Pepto-Dismal. His lips have calcified into the grin of a clown.

Too many worries, too much responsibility, and now the Desk Clerk must perform the Maid’s and Bellboy’s duties as well, and do so with the proper air of dignity so as not to seem to be a Desk Clerk demoted to a lesser office. No labor is as exhausting as that which one feels is beneath him. The buzzing bismuth-pink neon sign that hangs in the lobby window flickers its letters across the Desk Clerk’s body: TRANSIENTS WELCOME. Soon the flickery buzz of neon will be the only heat left, he thinks. And that old man who checked in earlier concerns him, as well. He’s not as transient as some the Desk Clerk has seen and could be trouble, like that priest who checked in long ago and who continues to reappear, leaving a slick of Extreme Unction. What does the old man want? Not a woman, not a boy.

Recalling the old men from his childhood who gimped along towed by gimpy old mutts, the Desk Clerk unlocks the door to the flyblown Lost and Found. The mutt a deadbeat guest left as collateral has been sleeping there. The Desk Clerk presumes that all who find their way to this hotel are lonely, but the old are lonelier still. He regards the menagerie that Lost and Found has become: a parakeet whose gibberish sounds like a forgotten name, the goldfish with piranha teeth that smiles sardonically as it rises to its fish flakes, the turtle with BUDDY crudely carved into its shell, and the hand-trained flies performing their x-rated aerial show — all emblems of loneliness. The Desk Clerk sends the dog up to the old man.

Were it the old woman he would have sent up a cat — although she probably had one already.

Were it a dog he would have sent up an old man.

There’s a logic to the term EQ that a manager in the hospitality industry needs to master. What, for instance, would he send a child?

The Desk Clerk’s gnawed thumbnail cracks the seal on a fifth of vodka. He pours vodka into the Pepto-Dismal bottle and swishes it around. He’s thinking of the children he never had, of children no one wanted, and of his own fatherless childhood. He has become the stepfather of his childhood self. What would he have sent himself that might have changed his life enough so that he didn’t end up behind this dead-end desk? When he swallows from the Pepto-Dismal bottle, the vodka tastes pink. He exhales and his breath hangs pinkish over the desk. He’s never understood why people say you can’t smell vodka. No one claims you can’t smell Pepto-Dismal. The conventional wisdom is to send children puppies, kittens, bunnies, hamsters, gerbils. But do animated stuffed animals teach a child the way of the world? Knowing what he knows now, the Desk Clerk would send himself what most terrified him — a spider.

And what would he send a spider?

The question buzzes in his head like an iridescent neon fury trapped between window and shade. He’s lived a nocturnal life behind this desk for what? To be rewarded with a demotion to Bellboy? And why? Because in working the night shift, I have relinquished my dreams. Because I have welcomed in phantoms the world pretends are real. Because I have ascribed to cause and effect — believed that diligence results in success, that obsequiousness precedes advancement, consoled myself with proverbs such as: We are all guests in a transient hotel. Because of expedience, because of timidity, because of constipation, because of logic — that misnomer for an utter lack of imagination.

He stands on the desk noosing night in the guise of a phone cord around his windpipe and when he sees the priest blessing him from the doorway of the Lost and Found, the Desk Clerk swings his body off with no excuse other than that he would have sent a spider a trained fly.

Fuses blow. Drains stop up. Upstairs, Old Martin lights the candle he packed in his suitcase. He suspects it has been night for more than twenty-four hours, but he won’t pull up the shade. No one has come to collect. He zips his empty change purse. Does this mean he is through paying bills? He hears paws scratching at the door, a muzzle snuffling, a whimper. He hears the prolonged vowel of a loyal creature that has caught the scent of death.

Martin holds his tin cup over the candle, heating rusty tap water. He takes his used tea bag from the plastic baggie. The night is getting cold. He sets his suitcase on fire and huddles beside it. He lights a smoke from his snuff can of butts and coughs up a taste of green pennies. He’s beginning to feel at home.