But then people were bereaved all the time; it happened, part of the fabric. And people’s lives continued, improved sometimes in unspoken ways, became richer. It was unfortunate but it happened, JJ just one more random cause, in there among cancers and car crashes and countless others. And at least too the children had been spared; she didn’t know it but she had that to be thankful for.
A cab pulled up, a guy in a suit stepping out, carrying a briefcase. JJ took the cab on back to his hotel, a long comfortable journey, the streets gradually darkening, lights appearing, the city washing over him as it made its way home.
He was tired, left melancholy by the day’s events. He needed sleep, to lose himself. And he needed to stop thinking, because every now and then he fell into a cycle of it, turning it all over, attempting to draw it all together, like there were answers inside certain moments, answers to where he’d been and where he was going, answers to who he was.
Probably no one had those answers anyway, no matter what they did for a living, and for the time being at least the only answers that mattered were the ones Holden was offering; the rest was a luxury.
8
He stared at the white clapboard walls beneath the clear blue sky, the russet tones of the surrounding trees, the leaf-strewn lawn. It looked like a house where people were happy, like a house from a hundred American stories where dramas served only as a relief against the return to contentment.
And then in that white clapboard house a phone was ringing and after just a couple of rings a woman answered.
“Good afternoon, this is the Copley Inn. How can I help?” It was what people in big hotels said but this sounded authentic, like the original greeting the business world had based its corporate drill upon.
“I’d like to book a room please, for tomorrow if that’s possible.”
“My goodness you’re lucky,” said the woman he already took to be Susan Bostridge though she could have been anybody. “We’re full but somebody unexpectedly has to leave tomorrow. Could I take your name please?”
“Yes. William Hoffman,” he said, hoping that the person leaving unexpectedly wasn’t Holden. Then he realized he’d given his real name, a sudden act of carelessness, perhaps because he was tired. It was a slip that nagged at him as he gave her the rest of his details, finished the niceties, the woman looking forward to seeing him the next evening.
When he put the phone down he folded up the page from the book of New England inns and threw it aside, sliding down the bed, lying there with tiredness bearing down on him like ballast. He drifted in and out of sleep but never for long and never satisfying and by eight he was awake again, a sudden jolt bursting through him like an electric shock, a sense of hollowness, of the blood draining out of his heart and leaving him lifeless.
He reached over and turned off the bedside lamp and lay for a while in the darkness, gauging whether more sleep would come, but his mind was unreeling, chattering away to itself, throwing up the day’s events and jarring echoes of the conversations he’d had, snippets of dead people talking.
He got up from the bed and went over to the window, looking at the nightscape of city light and darkness, a darkness that was concealing people’s lives, a city he felt isolated from, excluded from even. Years before he’d have been only a phone call away from some of those people, regular people. Somewhere along the line though he’d let them all go, replacing them with people who spoke the same coded language, and now that code was no good.
Maybe some of the old friends were still out there, going through the drill of everyday life. And maybe occasionally they thought fleetingly of him too, on the tube, staring from the office window, the mystery of his whereabouts briefly flickering across their conscious concerns.
It would be good, he thought, on a day like that, between life, to be with some of those friends, to tell them that he was still there, perhaps even in some ways the same person they’d known. It would be good as well to know that in the days following, those people would tell other people and that in some disembodied form his life, the person he’d been ten years before, would be spirited back into existence.
Yet as he thought about it in those terms, he wasn’t even certain how he’d changed, or if he’d changed. It was like he’d lost sight of himself, seeing only a shadow moving from place to place, going through the motions, doing just enough to merge with the crowd. Perhaps that was the real change: that he was no longer visible enough to be judged.
He walked back across the room, put the light on, and took a whisky from the minibar. He poured it and knocked it straight back, holding its anesthetic quality in his mouth for a while before letting it trickle down his throat.