the terrible map of veins etched into the top of his head.
''Only danced the one night. Came in here saying she'd never done it before and wanted to give it a shot. Must not have liked it much.''
''I see. Well, thanks anyway.''
''A damn shame, though,'' I hear him say as I make my way to the top of the stairs. ''We don't get 'em that young or pretty up here every day. No, sir, we have to live with whatever hand-me-downs we can get, so to speak.''
All of the messages have come from either Graham or Bert and all are marked URGENT. I can hear Graham holding the concierge's hand through the message-taking (''Can you please make sure that Bartholomew gets this,
Despite all this I decide not to call back. It's not a fear of having my employers tear a wide strip off me, nor is it humiliation for having done a profoundly unwise thing. I just don't have the energy to pull the cellular out of my bag, turn it on, and punch in the numbers.
Then the bedside phone rings.
In one spasm I pull the cord out of the wall and roll onto my back on the bed. And just when I start to think that the time has finally arrived to figure out the larger significance of recent events and make some serious decisions as to what to do next, sleep comes.
When I wake it's with the suddenness with which one responds to a noise, but the cool air of the room is silent. The night has collected again outside the windows, and the wind that sways the streetlight sends a shiver down from the back of my head, although I'm still fully dressed in my suit on top of the sheets. A quarter past three and there's no good reason to get up now, but I know that sleep won't return for me tonight.
I screw the top off the thermos and have to stick my hand in up to the wrist before my fingers hit powder. Pull up a choking dose and bury myself in it, coming up flush headed in the instant, gushing heat. Biting down hard on my lip to make sure something can still be felt.
And then I'm tipping the thermos over and spilling a crystal mountain out over the table, going at it without division or counting lines. Somewhere inside my head a door slams shut but I keep pulling it in, blowing the mountain into shape-shifting dunes. Something splashing into what remains on the table, a thousand transparent explosions. Thoughtless, narcotic tears.
Stop only when the blood starts. A blasting flood I don't attempt to cut off at first, let it stain where it falls. When it finally begins to slow I stanch it by pressing the nostrils together and counting to sixty until they're dried shut.
Then I'm putting on my coat again, stepping out the door and down the hall. Leaving my room, the hotel. I'm aware of this. But it's as though I observe myself from another place. Watch myself creak down the stairs, out the doors, and into the Lincoln, starting it up with a roaring pump of gas. Driving around the corner and taking the road north out of town.
Out beyond the last of the streetlights, beyond any light at all but the shallow range of halogen white that beams out from the front of the car. Arms so heavy, I can barely keep them on the wheel. A sound in my throat I recognize as my own voice. A wordless moan of fear.
Come to the turn for Fireweed Road and I'm slamming on the brakes, taking the corner on the fly, the wheel cranked with the flat of the hand, and make it like I've done it a dozen times. Arms extended before me, steering in jerky corrections. Swerving onto the cusp of a cottage lawn, then wrenching the wheel back to swing the car through the soft gravel at the side of the road. Too goddamn fast. Why am I driving so fast?
''Why are you driving so fast?''
In the car with me. A girl's voice coming from the backseat.
''Yeah, what's the big hurry?''
Another. A girl as well, but different from the first. Throw my eyes up into the rearview mirror but nothing's visible in the plush gloom.
''Who are you?'' I hear myself scratch out from the back of my throat.
''Don't you
''Yeah, don't you
Giggles. But in this child's sound there's also an edge of something older. A viciousness that cuts through the soundproofed space between us.
The speedometer needle shaking to the top of the circle, to the limit for travel on paved highways. A number far too high for a curving lakeside road at night.
Then movement in the backseat. A whisper of cotton over leather.
''You seem to know the way, don't you?''
Throw myself forward against the wheel, but that doesn't move me any farther from its cold breath. An arm resting on the back of my seat, a mouth that sighs through the crack below the headrest. There're waves of odors now too. The candy-sweet lilac of children's play perfume. Bloated fish washed up onto the mud shore.
''Are we going to get to see her, Dad?''
''Will you show us this time?''
The word comes out of me not as a word at all but a canine whimper.
''Because we know who
''Yeah, we know
Then it's my scream that blocks out everything else. Through the windshield the headlights flash upon oncoming trees, the wheel spins out of my hands, the car slams its side against their trunks but doesn't stop. Even the screech of folding metal is drowned out by this single, wavering scream.
A pair of frigid hands placed over my eyes.
But in the time it takes another scream to reach my lips there is the crunch of the car's front connecting with something that stops it dead. Then, for what is either a long time or no time at all, there's nothing.
It's still night. The cool air swirls in through the place where the windshield used to be, having already dried the better part of the blood trickling out from the cuts caused by flying glass. A sound in my head like a hornet trapped inside a paper cup and a throbbing behind my ears that expands with every beat of pulse. But I can still see. I can still hear.
As for my legs, I'm not so sure. Twisted around each other so tightly beneath the wheel they won't move on their own. I use my hands to lift one knee up, setting it off to the side as I bend the other in the opposite direction, flinging it out the open door. In a moment blood rushes back down both legs in a painful tingling, and with it the feeling slowly returns.
It's only then that I notice the car is still running. Despite the crushed hood and the steam that swells out from beneath it, the engine sputters on. I could back up out of here and roll home right now. But instead I pull the keys out of the ignition and let it rattle to a stop. And at the same moment as the night's quiet descends upon the wreck, a powerful dizziness floods my head. The space inside the car is suddenly too small, and in an awkward spasm I topple out onto the wet earth.
Mud instantly glued to every inch of me. I'm surprised by its weight, the way it makes lifting each limb a test of endurance. Hands held at the sides of my head, legs wobbly as a glue sniffer's. Stumbling down the path that isn't really a path at all but a zigzagging indentation through the brush. The wind drying the rain, leaves, and blood into a second skin.
I ask myself to stop, or think I do. For along with the noise in my head there's now the added sound of the lake coming in hard on the shore, driven by a wind that rips over its surface. Stand on the last rock at the farthest point out into the water, slip my shoes off with my heels, and kick them in. Ahead of me the night rolled out like endless black carpets.
Then I'm in the air. A forward collapse more than a dive. Yet in the time it takes to meet the water I take in the dome of stars over the lake, the glint of distant whitecaps, a whiff of cherry woodsmoke, before it all goes.
