Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“Animals?”

“I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?”

“Yes, but — well, I don’t see how I could — there are surely health regulations or something… complications, paperwork, feeding all those different… and allergies, of course, many guests have—”

“Oh, I understand, I understand,” Macon said. In the margin of his guidebook he was noting the number of wastebaskets: four. Excellent. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t seem that people ever take me up on that.”

“Will you recommend us anyway?”

“Certainly,” Macon said, and he closed his guidebook and asked for a list of the rates.

The rest of the afternoon he spent in hotels that he’d covered before. He visited managers in their offices, took brief guided tours to see that nothing had slid into ruin, and listened to talk of rising costs and remodeling plans and new, improved conference settings. Then he returned to his room and switched on the evening news. The world was doing poorly; but watching this unfamiliar TV set, propping his aching leg and braced in this chair that seemed designed for someone else’s body, Macon had the feeling that none of the wars and famines he saw were real. They were more like, oh, staged. He turned off the set and went downstairs to hail a cab.

At Julian’s suggestion, he was dining on the very top of an impossibly tall building. (Julian had a fondness for restaurants with gimmicks, Macon had noticed. He wasn’t happy unless a place revolved, or floated, or could be reached only by catwalk.) “Imagine,” Julian had said, “the effect on your out-of-town client. Yes, he’d have to be from out of town; I don’t suppose a native New Yorker…” Macon had snorted. Now the cabdriver snorted, too. “Cup of coffee there will cost you five bucks,” he told Macon.

“It figures.”

“You’re better off at one of those little Frenchy places.”

“That’s for tomorrow. In -town clients.”

The taxi coasted down streets that grew darker and more silent, leading away from the crowds. Macon peered out of his window. He saw a lone man huddled in a doorway, wrapped in a long coat. Wisps of steam drifted up from manhole covers. All the shops were locked behind iron grilles.

At the end of the darkest street of all, the taxi stopped. The driver gave another snort, and Macon paid his fare and stepped out. He wasn’t prepared for the wind, which rushed up against him like a great flat sheet of something. He hurried across the sidewalk, or was propelled, while his trousers twisted and flapped about his legs. Just before entering the building, he thought to look up. He looked up and up and up, and finally he saw a faint white pinnacle dwindling into a deep, black, starless sky eerily far away. He thought of once long ago when Ethan, visiting the zoo as a toddler, had paused in front of an elephant and raised his face in astonishment and fallen over backwards.

Inside, everything was streaky pink marble and acres of texture-less carpeting. An elevator the size of a room stood open, half filled with people, and Macon stepped in and took his place between two women in silks and diamonds. Their perfume was almost visible. He imagined he could see it rippling the air.

Have chewing gum handy, he wrote in his guidebook as the elevator shot upward. His ears were popping. There was a dense, un-resonant stillness that made the women’s voices sound tinny. He tucked his guidebook in his pocket and glanced at the numbers flashing overhead. They progressed by tens: forty, fifty, sixty… One of the men said they’d have to bring Harold sometime — remember Harold when he got so scared on the ski lift? — and everyone laughed.

The elevator gave a sort of lilt and the door slid open without a sound. A girl in a white trouser suit directed them down a corridor, into a spacious darkness flickering with candles. Great black windows encircled the room from floor to ceiling, but Macon was taken to a table without a view. Lone diners, he supposed, were an embarrassment here. He might be the first they’d ever had. The array of silver at his single place could easily serve a family of four.

His waiter, far better dressed than Macon, handed him a menu and asked what he wanted to drink. “Dry sherry, please,” Macon said. The minute the waiter left, Macon folded his menu in two and sat on it. Then he looked around at his neighbors. Everyone seemed to be celebrating something. A man and a pregnant woman held hands and smiled across the moony glow of their candle. A boisterous group to his left toasted the same man over and over.

The waiter returned, balancing a sherry neatly on a tray. “Very good,” Macon said. “And now perhaps a menu.”

“Menu? Didn’t I give you one?”

“There could have been an oversight,” he said, not exactly lying.

A second menu was brought and opened with a flourish before him. Macon sipped his sherry and considered the prices. Astronomical. He decided, as usual, to eat what he thought his readers might eat — not the quenelles or the sweetbreads but the steak, medium rare. After he’d given his order, he rose and slid his chair in and took his sherry over to a window.

All of a sudden he thought he had died.

He saw the city spread below like a glittering golden ocean, the streets tiny ribbons of light, the planet curving away at the edges, the sky a purple hollow extending to infinity. It wasn’t the height; it was the distance. It was his vast, lonely distance from everyone who mattered. Ethan, with his bouncy walk — how would he ever know that his father had come to be trapped in this spire in the heavens? How would Sarah know, lazily tanning herself in the sunshine? For he did believe the sun could be shining wherever she was at this moment; she was so removed from him. He thought of his sister and brothers going about their business, playing their evening card game, unaware of how far behind he’d left them. He was too far gone to return. He would never, ever get back. He had somehow traveled to a point completely isolated from everyone else in the universe, and nothing was real but his own angular hand clenched around the sherry glass.

He dropped the glass, causing a meaningless little flurry of voices, and he spun around and ran lopsidedly across the room and out the door. But there was that endless corridor, and he couldn’t manage the trip. He took a right turn instead. He passed a telephone alcove and stumbled into a restroom — yes, a men’s room, luckily. More marble, mirrors, white enamel. He thought he was going to throw up, but when he entered one of the cubicles the sick feeling left his stomach and floated to his head. He noticed how light his brain felt. He stood above the hotel pressing his temples. It occurred to him to wonder how many feet of pipe a toilet at this altitude required.

He heard someone else come in, coughing. A cubicle door slammed shut. He opened his own door a crack and looked out. The impersonal lushness of the room made him think of science-fiction movies.

Well, this difficulty probably happened here often, didn’t it? Or maybe not this difficulty exactly but others like it — people with a fear of heights, say, going into a panic, having to call upon… whom? The waiter? The girl who met the elevator?

He ventured cautiously out of the cubicle, then out of the restroom altogether, and he nearly bumped into a woman in the telephone alcove. She wore yards and yards of pale chiffon. She was just hanging up the phone, and she gathered her skirts around her and moved languidly, gracefully toward the dining room. Excuse me, ma’am, I wonder if you would be so kind as to, um. But the only request that came to mind rose up from his earliest childhood: Carry me!