In the Night Room

awkward spot—caught in gridlock, blocked from a turn by a huge double-jointed bus, stalled by a wave of people moving across the street.

When we got to Canal Street, the driver said, “I think we’re winning, Mr. Underhill. I haven’t seen them for ten, twelve blocks.”

Willy thanked her god, and I thanked mine. When we pulled up in front of the Golden Mountain garage, I tipped the driver fifty bucks. A car just like the one we had left came down the ramp, and we got in, and with Willy Bryce Patrick beside me I drove across the Hudson River in a night suddenly glittering with a thousand points of distant illumination.

I might have seen Mitchell Faber’s sharklike vehicle emerging from a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, and it is possible that just before she fell asleep, Willy spotted it coming over a hill about half a mile behind us. That’s why I made a quick tour of the parking lot before going back to our room.

We are in Room 119 of the Lost Echoes Lodge, located nine or ten miles from the freeway in Restitution, Ohio. We’re a long, long way from New York. It would be a miracle if they found us here, and I don’t think they will. There has already been a kind of miracle in the Lost Echoes Lodge, and one is enough.

I had been going to take two adjoining rooms, but Willy told me there was no sense in throwing money away, and besides, she had no intention of sleeping alone this night. “I want a warm body beside me, and since Tom is dead and we don’t have a golden retriever, you’re elected,” she told me.

We were still standing outside the lodge, taking in the astonishing structure before us. It looked like an infinitely ramifying Bavarian hunting lodge built in the 1920s for a timber millionaire. Gewgaws and rickrack ornamented the facade, which included complicated turrets and window embrasures. Every inch of the building seemed to be decorated with something, giant ivy sprigs carved from a dark wood, wooden ducks in flight and owls on branches, big clamshells half-embedded in cement. Once every sixty minutes, a giant cuckoo should have popped out of the heavy, cross-braced front door. Warm light shone through most of the windows. Dense trees edged in from the near side of the parking lot and crowded the back and sides of the building.

When we checked in, the desk clerk (a sweet little man named Roulon Davy, who turned out to be the owner of the Lost Echoes Lodge) nodded at our request for a room overlooking the parking lot, signed us in under the first name that came into my head, accepted a cash payment for one night, and led us up to Room 119.

“Most of our folks want a forest view,” he said, marching past the enormous bed to reach the set of windows at the far end of the room, “but if you fancy a prospect of the parking lot, here it is.” He pulled aside the heavy brocade curtains and let us look out. Over the tops of the trees, we could see the back half of the lot. Beyond it, thousands of trees blanketed the side of a steep hill.

Willy yawned. “Sorry. I can’t stay awake much longer.”

The little man twinkled to the middle of the room—there is no other way to describe his retreat. It looked like tap dancing, but his feet barely touched the floor. “Then, Mr. and Mrs. Halleden, I beg you to enjoy the perfection of your bed, the pleasures of your dreams, and the company of one another.”

He saluted us and was gone before I could offer him a tip.

“Methinks our gracious host is of the fairy folk,” Willy said.

“No,” I said, “I’m of the fairy folk.”

“Then let’s get in bed and be brother and sister.” She yawned again, and stretched her back. I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever seen. “You want to go in the bathroom first? You can use my toothbrush, if you like.”

I went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush; then she went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush. There was no top sheet on the bed, only a soft, daisy-patterned comforter that seemed to tuck itself around my shoulders. The bed felt cool, slightly yielding, unconnected to anything as solid as the floor.

Willy’s head poked out of the bathroom door, and she laughed at the sight of me. “You look pretty good, for an old dude. Or shouldn’t I say that?”

“Keep talking. Everything you say surprises me.”

“Lights out.”

The switch for the overhead light was between the bathroom and the door, and I saw a bare arm and a bare leg emerge into the room as she reached out. Her hand found the switch, and the room filled with purple shadows and silver moonlight. A small, pale body with white strips across its chest and beneath its smooth belly slid through the bright darkness and slipped into the bed.

“Oh, I love this bed,” Willy said. “I think this is the perfect bed, the one all other beds aspire to be. I’m too tired to think about agency and too fuzzy to contemplate the imponderables of our situation. Here I am, in a bed with Timothy Underhill. Everything is crazy, and nothing makes any sense, not even the slightest, faintest trace. At least I had a complete day, with no parts skipped over.”

She scooted a bit toward me, and I a bit toward her.

“You’ll hold me, won’t you? I think that would be heavenly, and I’m not even going to question why. I’m too bushed. But one thing I will say: in about an hour and a half I’m going to get up and prowl around the parking lot to see if that miserable fucking car is anywhere in sight.”

Her head fell gently on my chest, and I put my arms around her. I stroked her back, her shoulder, the cool, soft, silken length of the arm lying across my torso. Her slim straight leg nestled against my leg, and we lay like that for what seemed an eternity built up of one second after another. My hand moved to the small of her back and stroked the cool skin there. She did not feel like a fictional character; she felt like a lovely human being with a boy’s hips and a woman’s soft, duck-tail bottom, only smaller than most. It had been a long, long time since I had been in bed with a woman, and that had been nothing like this. I wanted to touch every inch of Willy Patrick, to slide into Willy Patrick’s tender body, and I wanted that with a depth of passion I had probably not felt since my twenties.

Her hand slipped down to the band of my undershorts, and my leg moved between hers.

“Oh, God,” she said, and I said, “I know. This is so odd.”

“Where are you?” she said. “Are you there? Ah, I see, you are there. My goodness. Don’t you think you should sort of wiggle out of that stupid thing you’re wearing? You’re so huge, you’re going to strangle yourself.”

I wiggled out of the stupid thing, my panting organ even harder for having been so blatantly flattered, and she shed her bra and her little tighty-whity with what seemed one fluid motion, and after that a kind of paradise opened before us. When I entered her, it was like entering paradise. Within her, I felt miraculously, blissfully at home—in the perfect place at last. I fell in love—that’s the corniest, most banal, and truest way to say it. Before, I had felt as though I was falling in love, and now I had completed the journey. I was there. I wanted to hold her, cherish her, celebrate her for the rest of my life. It happened that quickly: I felt cleaved to Willy Patrick, as if we had one soul. We were like the gods depicted in erotic transport on half-ruined temples lost in the middle of great jungles. In the end, we seemed to flow together, to wear each other’s skin and find ecstatic release as one four-legged, four-armed, two-headed organism.

“God,” Willy breathed. “You’re the author I want when I’m depressed, all right. I’m going to stop fretting about agency. I don’t care, I’ve never been fucked like that before, and I want more of it.”

“I have no idea how this is going to work out,” I said, and kissed the palm of her hand, “but I don’t ever want to lose you.”

“Why should you lose me?” Willy asked. “I’m yours, aren’t I?”

Soon after, she fell asleep. I slipped into my shirt and trousers and went the back way down to the parking lot, where something like a dozen cars, none of them silver Mercedes sedans, slept under the shelter of the looming trees.

What happened in this room is what Cyrax meant when he sent across my monitor in his Arial ten-point font u will have a chance of achieving something extraordinary & incestuous & ravishing unto heart-melt & impossible for every crack-brain author but u!

Now, ravishing unto heart-melt, Willy is raising her head and groping the pillow beside hers, and this crack- brain author is going to put down his pen and let her find me.

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