Via Dolorosa(14)

“Good deal,” Nick said, and the bellhop grinned and nodded. “Thank you. Is your boss Mr. Granger, the bell captain?”

“Yeah. You know Granger?”

“Just a little,” Nick said. He did not tell the bellhop that he had fought in Iraq with Myles Granger, the bell captain’s son. “Only in passing, really.”

“He’s not a bad guy. Son was killed overseas, I heard. In Iraq. He drinks too much now, sometimes forgets things and whatnot, but I guess that’s okay, you know? After, you know, having your kid killed like that and all. Not a bad guy, though. Hey, you smoke dope?”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, no problem. Okay. It’s just, you know, you artsy guys, you sometimes smoke up, that’s all. It’s just what I heard, I mean. But no biggie. Didn’t mean to offend you or anything, man.”

“You didn’t offend me.”

“I mean, you won’t say anything to Mr. Granger, will you?”

“Say anything about what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“About the dope, man.”

“Yes, I know,” Nick said. “I was being facetious.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah? Okay. Cool. I get it. Because,” the bellhop quickly added, “Granger would, like, have me canned if he knew I was, you know, saying that kind of thing to you. To the guests, I mean. In general.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m going to stop smoking, anyway. I mean, I just do it occasionally now. It’s not like a regular thing or anything. I don’t even have any shit on me. Stuff’s bad for you, know what I mean? Anyway, I got plans.”

“That’s good.”

“Maybe open up a restaurant here on the island some day.”

“That’s something,” Nick said.

“Yeah,” the bellhop said.

“So you like to cook?”

“Well,” the bellhop said, “I like to eat.”

The elevator stopped and the doors parted. The bellhop negotiated the dolly out of the elevator mostly on his own, then followed Nick down the hallway to the open area just beyond the lobby and the front desk to where Nick had begun his mural. There was a ladder already set up against the wall, and someone had come and cordoned off the area with velvet ropes so as not to have guests disturb him while he painted.

The bellhop, still conscious of Nick’s injured right hand, removed the trunk from the dolly without assistance. Nick stuffed his good hand into his pocket and fished around for a few bills.

“Oh, hey, forget it, man,” the bellhop said. “Let me go see if I can grab that key for you.”

“Thanks.”

Once the bellhop had left, Nick found himself quiet and alone with the sketch just above his head. This close it looked enormous. And empty. Again he was struck by how much he did not approve of it, but he also knew that he could spend the rest of the summer deliberating over it, changing it, working and reworking it, and nothing would ever get done. He would just have to do it and forget it and move the hell on. It was different than how he used to paint, and from the way he had, throughout his life, become accustomed to the art…but now, it was all he had left. He was a different person now, a different man, and so much had been thrust upon him in order to facilitate such a change. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, he knew. But he also knew that whatever doesn’t kill you sometimes only maims you and weakens you and makes you angrier and colder than you ever thought possible. Not for the first time, he acknowledged that, sometimes, it was probably better just to have it kill you.

His youth had taught him that. His adolescence, too. Most of all, Iraq had taught him that. Somewhere along the way he had developed an obsession with his ancestry and, in joining the military, he felt less as though he were perpetuating the momentum of his familial honorarium and more like he was fulfilling some greater destiny that, in truth, had very little to do with him as an individual and a human being, but as the next bearer in a succession of fate. Whatever it was, it was greater than that, and greater than him. His great-grandfather had been in the Great War; his grandfather had raised facial hair and lied about his age to run as a point-man in the Second World War; his father, too, had, like many of his generation, been collected and stowed and shipped off, like camouflaged bric-à-brac, destined to shuffle mirthlessly through Vietnam. To Nick, and at the time, it seemed that to buck fate and avoid war would be trickier than an illusionist’s escape from Sodom. It was his destiny. More importantly, it was the only noble thing.

He opened the trunk and sifted through the paints, removing the plastic tubs one at a time and setting them on the floor atop a length of canvas. He removed his brushes next and set them like artillery on the floor in order of smallest to largest. He repeated this process with all his tools until there was nothing left to do except step back and look at the empty sketch on the wall above his head once again.

You cannot put this off forever, he thought. You cannot escape it. Then he forced himself to laugh, once, sharply: a whip-crack.

He arranged his tubs on a tray and administered colors to his palette. It was a left-handed palette for right-handed painters, which made carrying it easier, but he knew the painting would be the difficult part. Yet he warned himself not to think about that, and ascended the ladder and stood face-to-face with the sketched mural, ghostly and vacant and transparent, and took a deep breath. Then he began to paint.