The Hotel New Hampshire

thought I was going to be sick, and Franny suddenly started to cry. Father took her down the hall, quickly—Susie the bear, worriedly but ever bear-like, went whining after them.

The customer who’d passed out when Screaming Annie finished the Krugerstrasse came to. He was awfully embarrassed to find Freud, me, the New Hampshire family, Screaming Annie, her daughter, and Babette all looking at him. At least, I thought, he was spared the bear—and the rest of my family. Late as usual, Old Billig wandered in; she’d been asleep.

“What’s going on?” she asked me.

“Didn’t Screaming Annie wake you, too?” I asked her.

“Screaming Annie doesn’t wake me up anymore,” Old Billig said. “It’s those damn world planners up on the fifth floor.”

I looked at my watch. It was still before two in the morning. “You’re still asleep,” I whispered to Old Billig. “The radicals don’t come this early.”

“I’m wide-awake,” Old Billig said. “Some of the radicals never went home last night. Sometimes they stay all night. And they’re usually quiet. But Screaming Annie must have disturbed them. They dropped something. Then they were hissing like snakes, trying to pick whatever it was up.”

“They shouldn’t be here at night,” Freud said.

“I’ve seen enough of this sordidness,” the New Hampshire woman said, seeming to feel ignored.

“I’ve seen it all,” Freud said, mysteriously. “All the sordidness,” he said. “You get used to it.”

Babette said she’d had enough for one night; she went home. Screaming Annie put Dark Inge back to bed. Screaming Annie’s embarrassed male companion tried to leave as inconspicuously as possible, but the New Hampshire family watched him all the way out of the hotel. Jolanta joined Freud and Old Billig and me at the second-floor landing. We listened up the stairwell, but the radicals—if they were there—were quiet now.

“I’m too old for the stairs,” Old Billig said, “and too smart to poke my nose where I’m not wanted. But they’re up there,” she said. “Go see.” Then she turned back to the street—to the gentle occupation.

“I’m blind,” Freud admitted. “It would take me half the night to climb those stairs, and I wouldn’t see anything if they were there.”

“Give me your baseball bat,” I said to Freud. “I’ll go see.”

“Just take me with you,” Jolanta said. “Fuck the bat.”

“I need the bat, anyway,” Freud said. Jolanta and I said good night to him and started up the stairs.

“If there’s anything to it,” Freud said, “wake me up and tell me about it. Or tell me about it in the morning.”

Jolanta and I listened for a while on the third-floor landing, but all we could hear was the New Hampshire family sliding every object of furniture against their doors. The youthful Swedish couple had slept through it all— apparently used to some kind of orgasm; or used to murder. The old man from Burgenland had possibly died in his room, shortly after checking in. The bicyclists from Great Britain were on the fourth floor, and probably too drunk to be aroused, I thought, but when Jolanta and I paused on the fourth-floor landing and listened for the radicals, we encountered one of the British bicyclists there.

“Bloody strange,” he whispered to us.

“What is?” I said.

“Thought I heard a bloody scream,” he said. “But it was down stairs. Now I hear them dragging the body round up stairs. Bloody odd.”

He looked at Jolanta. “Does the tart speak English?” he asked me.

“The tart’s with me,” I said. “Why not just go back to bed?” I was perhaps eighteen or nineteen on this night, I think; the effects of the weight lifting, I noticed, were beginning to impress people. The British bicyclist went back to bed.

“What do you think is going on?” I asked Jolanta, nodding upstairs, toward the silent fifth floor.

She shrugged; it was nowhere near Mother’s shrug, or Franny’s shrug, but it was a woman’s shrug. She put her big hands in the deadly purse.

“What do I care what’s going on?” she asked. “They might change the world,” Jolanta said of the radicals, “but they won’t change me.”

This somehow reassured me, and we climbed to the fifth floor. I hadn’t been up there since I’d helped move the typewriters and office equipment, three or four years ago. Even the hall looked different. There were a lot of boxes in the hall, and jugs—of chemicals or wine? I wondered. More chemicals than they needed for the one mimeograph machine, anyway—if they were chemicals. Fluids for the car, I might have thought; I didn’t know. I did the unsuspecting thing; I knocked on the first door Jolanta and I came to.

Ernst opened it; he was smiling. “What’s up?” he asked. “Can’t sleep? Too many orgasms?” He saw Jolanta just behind me. “Looking for a more private room?” he asked me. Then he asked us in.

The room adjoined two others—I remembered that it was once joined to only one other—and its furnishings looked substantially different, although, over the years, I had not seen a single large item carried in or out; just those things I assumed Schraubenschlüssel needed for the car.

Schraubenschlüssel was in the room, and Arbeiter—the ever-working Arbeiter. It must have been one of the large battery-type boxes that Old Billig and I had heard fall off a table, because the typewriters were in another part of the room; clearly no one had been typing. There were some maps—or maybe they were blueprints —spread about, and there was the automobile-like equipment one associates with service garages, not offices: chemical things, electrical things. The radical Old Billig, who’d called Arbeiter crazy, was not there. And my sweet Fehlgeburt, like a good student of American literature, was either home reading or home asleep. In my opinion, just the bad radicals were there: Ernst, Arbeiter, and Wrench.

“That was one hell of an orgasm tonight!” Schraubenschlüssel said, leering at Jolanta.

“Another fake,” Jolanta said.

“Maybe that one was real,” Arbeiter said.

“Dream on,” Jolanta said.

“You’ve got the tough one following you around, eh?” Ernst said to me. “You’ve got the tough piece of meat with you, I see.”

“All you do is write about it,” Jolanta said to him. “You probably can’t get it up.”

“I know just the position for you,” Ernst told her.

But I didn’t want to hear it. I was frightened of them all.

“We’re going,” I said. “Sorry to disturb you. We just didn’t know anyone was here at night.”

“The work backs up if we don’t occasionally stay late,” Arbeiter said.

With Jolanta at my side, her strong hands hugging something in her purse, we said good night. And it was not my imagination that—just as I was leaving—I caught sight of another figure in the shadows of the farthest adjoining room. She also had a purse, but what she had in her purse was out—in her hand, and trained on Jolanta and me. It was just a glimpse I had of her, and her gun, before she slipped back in the shadows and Jolanta closed the door. Jolanta didn’t see her; Jolanta just kept watching Ernst. But I saw her: our gentle, mother-like radical, Schwanger—with a gun in her hand.

“What do you have in your purse, anyway?” I asked Jolanta. She shrugged. I said good night to her, but she slipped a big hand down the front of my pants and held me a moment; I’d hopped out of bed and into some clothes so fast that I’d not taken the time for underwear. “You going to send me out on the street again?” she asked me. “I want just one more trick before I call it a night.”

“It’s too late for me,” I said, but she could feel me growing hard in her hand.

“It doesn’t feel too late,” she said.

“I think my wallet’s in another pair of pants,” I lied.

“Pay me later,” Jolanta said. “I’ll trust you.”

“How much?” I asked, when she squeezed harder.

“For you, only three hundred Schillings,” she said. For everyone, I knew, it was three hundred Schillings.

“It’s too much,” I said.

“It doesn’t feel like too much,” she said, giving me a sharp twist; I was very hard at the moment, and it hurt.