Via Dolorosa(4)

“It’s like a completely different place,” the girl said, facing the storm. “It’s as if we’ve been uprooted and dislocated and we’re trapped here, now and forever. It’s like a dream, a bad dream, but I know I’m not asleep and I’m not dreaming. It’s hard to find sleep thinking of it in that way, and thinking of us uprooted and dislocated that way. It’s so sad, to think how wonderful and bright and sunny yesterday was, and all the other days, and then how dreary and sad it all was today.”

“It’s only rain,” he told her. He tried to recall the sensation of her warm legs and cold feet against him beneath the sheets as he had experienced it as recently as the night before. But it seemed a distant memory, and it was as though something deep within him refused him access to it. He remained on his back, unmoving, his eyes locked on the patio doors across the room, and on the shape of the girl standing before them. “Everything,” he said, “will be better and back to normal once it passes.”

“Do you promise?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think it’s possible for the whole island to drown?” the girl asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure? It seems like something I might have heard once, or maybe read in the papers.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s a tremendous amount of rain.”

“It’s a very large island. Anyway,” he said, “they’re prepared for storms like this.”

“I saw that,” said the girl.

“Saw what?”

“The blue signs posted along the highway on the drive in. Didn’t you see them? They were big blue signs with a picture of a hurricane on it. We drove in along the evacuation route.”

“This is just a storm,” he said, “not a hurricane.”

“Can you be so sure?”

“Hurricanes are different. They’re stronger and there’s more wind and they come much more suddenly than a regular storm.”

“Have you ever been in a hurricane?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

He shifted his eyes away from the patio doors and stared up at the ceiling. The room was suddenly very dark. He watched for quite a while the blinking red eye of the smoke alarm above him.

“How do you know?” she said again.

“Excuse me,” he said, peeling the sheet off and standing and moving across the small room to the bathroom. He turned the light on and washed his face in the sink. There were seashells placed randomly around the sink basin; she had spent yesterday afternoon collecting them at the edge of the water. He continued to wash his face and to examine it in the long mirror above the sink. What a long, sad, old-looking face you are, he thought. You’ve only been on this earth twenty-seven years, and what an old-looking face you are.

The water felt good. Until now, he hadn’t realized he’d been perspiring. It was a small, deeply enclosed bathroom, claustrophobic and damp. The moisture from their morning shower still hung in the air. They’d gotten their clothes sandy and wet yesterday down by the water, and she had hung them across the retractable clothes line over the tub to dry them out. He went to them and felt them now. The clothes were still damp and stiff with sand.

Back in the room, he was somewhat relieved to find the girl asleep in the big bed. He stood for some time, listening to the unlabored ease of her breathing over the strong rush of the storm, and did not move.





—Chapter II—





He dressed quietly in the dark, not wanting to wake the girl, and slipped out of the room into the narrow, peach-colored hallway of the hotel. Here, the lighting was poor and there were no windows along the hallway. The wallpaper was undeniably floral in pattern, though faded with age and vaguely nondescript, the way shapes on the horizon may sometimes look to someone suffering from nearsightedness; sections peeled at the corners and rolled up in brittle, curled, cigarette shapes. They were on the sixth floor, six doors down from the stand of elevators, and as he walked to the elevators he counted down the numbers on all the doors silently in his head as they gradually descended.

Downstairs, the lobby was quiet. Nick walked its length, conscious of the urgent rush of rain against the lobby skylights, and of his footfalls desperate and lonely on the linoleum. It was an old hotel, and the ground-level corridors were not open and spacious and brightly lit but, rather, small and serpentine and hard to find. At times, it was like wandering lost through the subconscious mind of a senile old man. Before a blank wall toward the rear of the lobby, Nick paused and, hands wedged in his pockets, looked up at the rough sketching there done with a series of graphite pencils, completed over the past two weeks. Completed? he thought. Is it really? Colorless, unfulfilled, the sketch was like the ghost of some long-dead reality. It was rough, raw. He stepped back to take it all in. He did not like it, he realized. He’d given it two days to sit, had thought he would like it, or at least would be contentedly pleased with it, but standing here now, he found he did not like it and was not pleased with it at all.

The sketch was of a quaint summer courtyard, not dissimilar to the hotel’s own courtyard, dense with magnolia blossoms and tropical fronds, abutted by a great sprawling sea and bisected by a winding stone path. There were people, various people, populating the landscape, but their evolution had been temporarily stunted at rough caricatures, their sexes indeterminable, their emotions nonexistent. He had sketched them then discarded them then sketched them again. He had sketched until his sketching hand ached and pained him and became so insubordinate that he could no longer work. Looking at the drawing now, he felt it was too naked to move forward, and he silently wondered when he would feel right—or if he would ever feel right—about moving ahead with the process.