I began swimming hard. The most difficult thing was maintaining my orientation, keeping my head clear as to where I was and where I was trying to get. After it seemed I had swum half an hour I began to panic; I felt my effort collapsing. In fact I probably hadn’t swum half an hour at all. Probably it was more like ten minutes. I was treading and thinking to myself, I’m thirty-eight or thirty-nine; my body does not believe it. My body believes my face, which believes my heart, and it makes me an old man in the water, who believes his panic and exhaustion. For the moment I cared nothing about her, I cared nothing about Ben Jarry. This, I said to myself, maybe aloud though I don’t remember, this is as my damned traitor heart would have it. It would have me in my tower living in the gloom of moral death. I began to swim again. I swam against my face and my heart, I swam as though I had my face in one hand and my heart in the other, and I pummeled the sea with them in order that they would take me, against their will, where I chose to go.
On the island I slept. I dreamed I buried my face and my heart in the sand, the first wrapped around the second.
I didn’t lie there very long. The cold woke me; I was wet through and through, and there on the edge of the sea was a hard wind, though an hour before the night had been still. The hotel hovered before me, a monstrous dark yawn, and I got up and headed for it. I was walking around it ten minutes before I found the entrance. There were no doors, just a gouge where glass had been. There was no light. I was cold and inside the building it wasn’t much warmer. A corridor turned south and shot off in the distance, each side of it lined with little cubicles: empty ticket agencies and barbershops and clothes boutiques and post offices and rental centers filled with busted mirrors and dilapidated shelves and counters, maps across walls and racks with old postcards and magazine stands and ledges filled with small cracked bottles and things I couldn’t make out. At the end of the corridor were some stairs. I stumbled up in the dark and could see the main lobby of the hotel open up before me, a black expanse, rows of motionless elevators and a dining hall and beyond that a lounge. I thought I heard some sort of music overhead and caught a glittering of something framed within the gash of the ceiling. I found myself staring up into a huge tunnel that ran through five or six floors of rooms to the sky; the glitter was stars in the distance.
A light was coming from the lounge. I held myself, shuddering. I’m damn cold, I said out loud. I got to the doorway of the lounge and it was immediately warmer. A bulb was burning at one end of the room dirty orange electricity. I said to myself, What, they have someone come around and change the bulbs? The lounge was gritty and lined with webs; a bar was at the back shadowed and still, with liquor bottles on the shelves behind it and glasses sitting upside down on what was once a white cotton towel. All of it was dimly visible to me in the light of the hearth at the other end of the room, where a fire was burning. The hearth was set in large flat stones and surrounded by large worn chairs. I went over to the fire and was standing there several moments before I realized someone was sitting in one of the chairs. “Lee?” he said, blinking at me in the dark.
I looked at him in stupefaction. He stood up and came over to me. He was tall, probably as tall as Jon Wade but nowhere near the mountainous build; he moved like an aristocrat. As far as I could tell from the flames of the fire he was in his mid-fifties. He was stylishly dressed and groomed but his face had a certain thickness to it, as though he drank a lot. At this moment, in fact, he was holding an amber glass with ice clinking in it and seemed just the slightest bit tipsy.
“My God, Lee,” he said, touching my shirt, “you’re drenched. What the hell happened to you?” He pulled me by the elbow to one of the other chairs and I sat down in it. “Look here,” he said, “can I get you something from the bar?” He was watching me with utter concern. I stared at him and then over at the bar in the dark with all the dusty glasses upside down on the dirty white towel. I looked at the glass in his hand and back up at him, and water ran from my hair into my eyes.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Here,” he said, “pull the chair closer to the fire.” He started to pull me out of the chair so he could move it closer to the fire.
“It’s all right,” I said, resistant. “I’m fine here.” I looked around me.
“What happened to you anyway?” he said. “I’ve been waiting damn near forever. The damn phone doesn’t work or I would have called.” He squinted at me in the dark.
I shook my head. “I’m not Lee.”
He kept squinting at me. He sighed heavily. “No, I can see that now.” He took a gulp from his amber glass and turned to the fire, anxious. He turned back to me. “Well
