I could not remember. I could not remember if we had done what I thought we had done. The heavy fob clinked against the door as she put the key in the lock. We were always in the same place, this motel made of particleboard and sadness. Rooms rented by the month. The front desk protected by a thick scuffed sheet of Plexiglas.
The door rattled when our neighbors walked by.
She was from long ago. I saw her in the yellow light of long ago. In the yellow light I watched her unpack, concentrated, burrowing down, throwing shoes and underwear on the floor. She took out her Ziploc bags of supplements. You could hear next door moving about in their room, then an EDM beat began to punch its way through the wall. Neither of us could speak. We knew we were both thinking about the same thing, about the gaping wound in the young man’s side. The bloody rise and fall of what? Not his heart. Some other organ.
From the second-floor walkway, you could see the oil-stained parking lot. A line of fast-food neon over a chain link fence. Some guy was kicking the hell out of the vending machine.
motherfuckeryoufuckeryoumotherfucker
The clerk hovered nervously. Stop with that. You break it I’m gonna call the cops.
Hello my name is. I had the pleasure of cleaning your room. A handwritten God Bless and a smiley. Leonie’s head, moving back and forth at my hips, the hollow of her cheek, the eye drugged or lazy, fixed on me, daring me to challenge her, daring me not to come.
—Not my machine, I tell you not my problem! Call number on side and talk to them.
—Seth.
motherfuckeryoufuckeryoumotherfucker
—Seth. Calm down. Stop doing that. Get a grip on yourself.
I told her I’d go out for food. Let her go, I thought. She’ll never find another man like you.
—Get a bottle too?
—What kind?
—Anything. Tequila? Get tequila and a big bottle of Sprite. The ice machine works, right?
I was too tired to drive to the liquor store. I couldn’t trust myself at the wheel of a car. So I was walking, and I had always been walking, I have always been walking, I am walking and my mind is clear, my consciousness sharp, in the present moment, in the bubble, and I even dare to think of the future. A starless night, nobody on the street. I have wandered off the strip into a landscape of dead theaters, one on every block. Roxys and Ritzes with their blank marquees. Do not trespass signs. For sale serious only save the BS. The other stores all boarded up. I can’t see anywhere that might sell liquor. I can’t see anywhere open at all. There is a diner on a corner, blazing with light, a beacon of plate glass and chrome in the darkness.
I take a booth and order a steak, looking out at the desolate street, the red sign of the Saint James Hotel visible over the roofline.
My steak, when it comes, is thick and bloody. I cut into it with relish. I realize I have been very hungry. The sign over the counter. Whites Only.
At one point I had been carrying records. I look down to check. No records. Instead, by the side of the bench is a battered black guitar case. How long have I been carrying a guitar?
I am sitting in the booth. I am walking along the highway, as trucks roar by. Let her go, I think. You have to let her go. I am paying my check, scattering coins over the table. I am in the darkness, the highway in the distance, picking my way through parking lots, over the barrier from one to the next. I am leaving the restaurant, stepping over the dividers, carrying a bag from a liquor store. Behind me, taking the same path, is a man walking a large dog, a pit bull or a mastiff. I look over my shoulder every so often. The man and his dog keep their distance, neither gaining nor slowing. I walk more quickly. The man with the dog is behind me, making his way between the parked cars.
The motel sign up ahead. A red neon arrow. Rooms. At first I take the blue lights for decoration, some feature the manager switches on at night. Then I see there are police cars. Uniformed officers everywhere, on the walkway, milling around in reception. I walk through the parking lot and they see me and as one organism, one blue body, they turn and draw guns and there is the sound of running feet in the lot around me and someone yells drop it.
—Drop it! Now!
Three, four guns. Panic, repeating it, shouting. Slowly I put down the guitar, I put down the box of records, I put down the plastic bag with the tequila and the plastic bag with the Sprite and the paper bag of takeout on the ground. I straighten up and raise my hands.
The door to our room is open. Cops all milling round, craning their necks to take a look.
—Down! On the floor!
My hands are forced behind my back. There is a knee on my neck. I can’t breathe, I say.
—Shut up.
—Leonie? Leonie!
—Shut up. You’re calling out to her? You vicious little bastard. You sick fuck.
The open doorway. The shadows beyond it. All the uniforms down now. Down on me. Knees and elbows and heavy out-of-shape breathing and someone grinding his knuckles into my temple, digging on some nerve. I begin to scream. All the uniforms down on me.
AFTER I LEFT HIS APARTMENT, Chester Bly vanished from my life. The next day he was missing from his desk in the newsroom. By the following week, someone else was sitting there, accumulating messy piles of paper in a way Chester would never have tolerated. One of the other messengers said he got fired. No one seemed to know what for.
Soon afterwards I quit my own job at the Trib and become a clerk at the 8th Street Bookstore. The owner said I was hanging around so much I might as well get paid for it. I went to readings, hovered on the edges of conversations about art and politics. I told myself I was done with record collecting, and whatever evil hung around Chester Bly had spared me as it passed overhead. My only unsevered connection was the shelf of 78’s lurking behind the batik cloth, untouched and unlistened to.
I kept meaning to cancel my magazine subscriptions, but the issues kept coming. I couldn’t bring myself to throw out the pile of unread Down Beats and Jazz Reviews without at least looking at them, so one day, instead of throwing them into the trash chute, I found myself crouching down in the hallway outside my apartment, flipping pages, skimming headlines and reader’s polls. In one I found a small ad.