Infinite(4)

One of the police deputies drove me as far as Bloomington-Normal, and I took a train from there into the city. I walked to the hotel where I worked, which was on Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park. I booked a room and got out of the lobby before the staff could fawn over me with their sympathy. I spent the next two days and nights in a kind of hibernation. The phone rang; I ignored the calls. People knocked on the door; I didn’t answer. I ordered room service and had them leave the trays outside, and then I put them back in the hallway later, having eaten almost nothing at all.

Did I drink?

Yes, I drank a lot.

I know what you probably think of me. Dylan drinks. He gets into fights. He is a bad man. I can’t really disagree with you. It’s been that way since the death of my parents, but that’s not an excuse for how I’ve led my life. It simply is what it is. My vices cling to me like boat anchors. Karly told me once that I was always doing battle with another side of myself and that one day I would have to make the choice to cast him aside. But I’ve never known how to do that.

Sometime during my second night in the hotel, I had a nightmare that I was still under the water. I was a blind man, with no compass to guide me, swimming deeper into an abyss of darkness. The heaviness weighed on my lungs, like a balloon about to be popped. Somewhere beyond my reach, I could hear Karly’s muffled voice calling to me, begging for rescue.

Dylan, come find me! I’m still here!

I awoke tangled in the blankets. I was bathed in sweat, gasping as I stared at the ceiling. My blood was still poisoned with alcohol, leaving me dizzy. The hotel room spun like a carousel. I got out of the ultraplush bed and went to the window. Grant Park stretched out below me, the glow of lights lining the street that led toward Buckingham Fountain. Behind the park, Lake Michigan loomed like the stormy backdrop of a painting. Normally, I loved this view, but now I saw nothing but my own reflection in the glass, going in and out of focus.

Dylan Moran.

I stared at that face and saw a stranger reflected back from the window. I couldn’t see inside the person who was staring at me. It was as if I had broken into pieces and left part of myself with that other man on the bank of the river. And yet, for all that, the reflection was still me. My face.

My black hair is bushy and a little unkempt. My dark eyebrows are thick, arching like the hunched shoulders of a gargoyle. My face is full of sharp angles, a tight jawline, pointed chin, hard cheekbones, fierce little nose. Karly would joke that she had to be careful when she caressed my face because she might cut her fingers. I wear heavy stubble on my lip and chin, mostly because I can never seem to shave it completely away, so I stopped trying. It’s like a shadow that goes with me everywhere.

I’m not tall. My driver’s license says I’m five ten, but my doctor knows I’m barely five nine. I stay in good shape, running, boxing, lifting weights, doing all the things that a short, skinny kid does to make himself look tougher. I want everyone to know you don’t mess with Dylan Moran, and you can see that in my eyes. They are ocean-blue eyes, intense and angry. I’ve spent too much of my life angry about something. It never seemed to matter what it was.

It was funny. Not long after we got married, Karly was digging around in Edgar’s apartment, helping him straighten things up, and she found a photograph of me when I was about twelve years old. This was before everything happened with my parents. Before the high school years when Edgar and I argued over grades and girls and smoking and drugs. I didn’t look all that different back then, not physically. I still had the same messy haircut, and I was already about as tall as I was ever going to be. But Karly looked at that photograph and then over at me, and I could see what she was thinking.

What happened to you, Dylan?

Back then, I had a big smile and a wide-eyed innocence. I’d been a happy kid, but that young kid was long gone. He’d died in the bedroom with my parents. Staring at my reflection in the hotel window, with the park and the lake hovering behind my face, I said the same thing out loud.

“What happened to you, Dylan?”

Then I put a half-full bottle of vodka to my lips, drank what was left, shouted a profanity at the city about a dozen times, and threw the glass bottle against the wall. It broke into razor-like pieces that sprayed across the bedsheets. I sighed with disappointment at myself. It always happened like this, again and again. I went and gathered up the shards, and then I sat down by the side of the bed and squeezed the glass fragments in my fists until blood oozed through my fingers.

For the rest of the night, I stayed right there, until the blood dried and I finally fell asleep.



The first wave of grief can’t go on forever. You may feel dead, but eventually you realize you’re still alive, and you have to figure out how to go on.

On the morning of the fourth day, I picked out a suit from the closet in my hotel room. My assistant manager, Tai, had arranged for some of my work clothes to be sent here from my apartment. She was efficient that way. I took a shower, put on the suit, knotted a tie tightly against my neck, and left the room. I wasn’t really ready to go back out into the world, but I didn’t have a choice.

I took the elevator to the lobby. The LaSalle Plaza was one of downtown’s grand old hotels, dating all the way back to the White City days of the Chicago World’s Fair. You could feel turn-of-the-century ghosts here, passing you with a brush of silk. The lobby glistened with marble floors, a chambered ceiling, and elaborately decorated archways of glass, brass, and stone.