Short Story by William Barclay
When they checked into the hotel, Carolyn remembered something strange. A year ago, probably to the day, they had been in France. There were no problems then with the lavatories or with airport security. They had each brought a single bag. It was a group vacation, one of those organized tours, and they had been surrounded by strangers who talked over everything and laughed raucously at secret jokes. Steven hated the tour guides, hated walking around in a herd and being told where to look. He wanted to see great art and had no interest in street performers or the clever boutiques at the Palais Royal. They separated from the group; they spent hours looking at Caravaggios; they made love the day before they came home. It was pleasing in a comfortable and entirely familiar way, the way their friends’ vacations were pleasing. And now, a year later, this.
There was no accounting for life. She had learned that much, and yet Carolyn was still prepared. While they waited for the elevator, trailed by a bellman hauling their collection of trunks, she inspected the list of names and phone numbers, the precisely choreographed itinerary, the new dosing schedule. She managed her existence this way, writing everything down on checklists and color-coded index cards held together by rubber bands. She was no longer herself; she was the thing on those papers; she was the next thing.
In their room, plain but decent and overlooking a narrow, tree-lined courtyard, she helped Steven into the bathroom and onto the toilet. She took a dampened washcloth to his face, being careful not to rile the sore that had appeared on his chin. She brushed his teeth. While Carolyn brewed his coffee—decaf, not that it mattered, not that he would actually drink it—she inspected the brochures fanned out along the table in the kitchenette. They were provided by companies that sold hiking equipment and offered rafting trips for outdoorsmen and their families. Sun River, she was reminded, offered you the time of your life.
Armed with his coffee, Steven worked some more on his letter to the family. It was his opus, composed over the course of months using a device that translated his speaking voice into large blocks of text on a laptop computer. It was a stupid machine. It put contractions where whole words should have been; it didn’t know the difference between “am” and “an”. His words were punctuated by long pauses, by neck spasms and short, sudden gasps for air. A couple of times, when the machine went haywire or he forgot where he left off, he glanced over at Carolyn and widened his eyes comically. This was his wink, his shrug. They could still laugh, couldn’t they?
Soon he drifted off. He was sleeping more and more lately. Whether it was the drugs or the stress or the gradual diminution of his body no one knew. He could sit there for hours, twelve or fourteen at a time, waking only to chew on muscle relaxants or sip water through a straw. Carolyn usually read a book. This time she decided to go for a walk, although she wasn’t entirely sure why. Air seemed like a good idea, fresh air, and even though it was dark she thought that she might recognize a thing or two.
She headed out along the main road and tried to remember which of the side streets would take her down to the gorge. It had been more than twenty years since she and Steven had stumbled upon the lonesome sandstone gorge and that dusty knoll where they shared a picnic lunch and watched tiny pinpoint men scale far-off mountains. They were like that then, not brave enough to summit a mountain, not exactly, but young enough to sit and look at one. Now she dreaded the thought of Steven in his chair, wincing as they crossed over unpaved roads and cursing her in his mind for taking the long way.
The town was larger than she remembered it, but prettier, too. Rows of tiny shops and mock cottages had sprung up along the thoroughfares. The streets themselves were mostly empty, illuminated by old fashioned street lamps, by the glimmer of a half-obscured crescent moon, and the steady clapping of her feet against the pavement reminded Carolyn how wonderfully far she was from home. What a little silence could do; how easily it could swallow up time and place. Yes, even people. Especially people.
Wandering down side roads and winding in and out of cul-de-sacs, she realized after a little while that she was lost. In the distance, some tiny glass-fronted place—a restaurant or maybe a bar—lit the sidewalk in spheres of green and gold. She decided to go in, just to ask for directions, really, but when she did, the bartender set down a menu. Carolyn wondered if it was fate. She believed in fate sometimes.
The place itself was darker than it had seemed and Carolyn found herself surrounded by sights and sounds which seemed familiar, but only vaguely so, like memories from childhood or perhaps from some past life, memories, she was sure, which were better left forgotten. There were the bleary-eyed older men, the vapid, giggling young girls, the deafening clang of too many people and things. But there was music as well and the music, although she couldn’t place it, the sound of music still made her smile. When the bartender returned, Carolyn ordered a white wine, whatever they had, the drier the better. She couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a drink and when it came the wine scorched her tongue. It was rotten; it was just like too-ripe pears and she suspected the bottle had been corked, but it went to her head in a way that helped her forget about the taste.
“Climber?”
The man glancing over at her was young and broadbacked, sitting two stools down, with a beard that looked as though it might have grown in by accident. Carolyn had seen him earlier, staring off at persons or places unknown, but his sudden attention still left her confused. “Excuse me?” she asked, trying her best to smile.
“The climbing, is that it? Are you here for the climbing?” Carolyn thought for a moment that he was being deliberately stupid, that he was mocking her age and her situation, and then, looking down at her plain khaki pants and practical shoes, it dawned on her that she was perhaps dressed for the part. Were there really female climbers? Of her age?
“Yes,” she said in a tone meant to be deadpan. “I can hardly get enough of climbing. Mountains, rocks, anything really.”
He nodded his agreement and then began to tell her his story in the way that people do to strangers in bars, with great attention to detail, with sweeping movements of his hands, with a voice so loud and booming that it made her blush. He had, Carolyn learned, read a magazine article about someone kayaking the Kali River and decided to circle the globe in search of the world’s fiercest rapids. He travelled with a friend, a rich friend who funded their expeditions, and the two of them had already visited four continents and more than a dozen states. He hated Tambor and loved Phuket. Once, while passing through Cyprus, he had broken his wrist and had it set by a local shaman. It healed in a matter of days. She marveled at the very idea of people like him, of just picking up and going somewhere. He seemed every bit as reckless and brave, every bit as childlike, as the men in her books.
“You know,” she said, straightening up a little, “I don’t think that there’s anything more glorious than standing on a mountaintop at daybreak. Just at daybreak, I mean. When the sun is coming up and the sky is light.” Carolyn wondered where she had heard that, probably in a movie. For a second, she was quite proud of herself and then, suddenly, an image: her sagging neck and sunken cheeks, the lines around her eyes, that time of night, a woman alone, some strange bar. What must he be thinking?
“Actually, my husband and I did a pre-dawn climb not far from here,” she said, emphasizing it—emphasizing her husband—as best she could. “Just a few days after we were married.”
“That’s cute,” he said in a way that left Carolyn embarrassed. “So this is part two then? Sort of a second honeymoon?”
“Well, no,” she told him, tracing the outline of her glass with one finger. It occurred to her that the man was waiting, that she would need to tell him something more, and then, as quickly as she realized it, the something appeared, as if it had willed itself into being, as if it had perhaps been waiting all this time for a chance to emerge. “My husband is dead.”
It was a horrible thing to say. Carolyn did not understand where the words had come from or why, having said them, she did not feel guilty or ashamed. Just this: she had said them. She wanted to take another drink, something stronger, maybe a whiskey sour. Yes, whiskey sounded good. It occurred to her that she could probably stay there and drink until the bar closed, until she could barely stand and had forgotten where she was. No one knew her there. What difference would it make?
Things became quiet for her.
She ordered another glass of wine and then, because she remembered that she hated the wine, a cognac. The man with the beard said something brief and meaningless about rivers and rainfall, but was otherwise silent. Carolyn understood. The alcohol made her breath feel heavy and allowed her to lose track of the space between herself and the man, between the man and the street, between the street here and the street she knew as a girl. She had been meaning to go back and visit. Her poor mother.
Finally, when she found herself gripped by a strange and uncomfortable ringing in her ears, Carolyn excused herself and exited to the restroom. She paid her tab, leaving the bartender an especially large tip. What a nice man to stand there and draw her a map on the back of a napkin. What a nice place. The world was smaller than it sometimes seemed. On her way out, she put a hand on the shoulder of the bearded man.
“I need to go now,” she told him. “But good luck with the river.”
He stared back at her blankly. Carolyn realized that she had interrupted, that he was already having a conversation with another man, this one clean-shaven but equally large. She thought it might be the friend he had told her about. Soon after she left, a brief chorus of laughter poured out of the bar, echoing off of the abandoned storefront across the street and Carolyn wondered if it was them, the two adventurers, laughing at the foolish old lady and her talk of mountaintops.
She looked at the map only briefly. The hotel, it turned out, was closer than she had realized, and on the way there she was able to locate the road that led down to the gorge. She followed it halfway down, until she could see what she thought was moonlight reflecting off of the water, and decided not to go any further. It was dreadful, just a haphazard slit carved into the earth. It was worse than dreadful; it was nothing; it was the absence of space. Carolyn hated this town now, how it was crowded and desolate all at once, how far away it seemed from every familiar signpost, every hint of civilization. She should have never left the hotel, she knew that now. She ought to have stayed with Steven, to have finished her book and taken her pill and fallen asleep to the sound of the television. It was, after all, her job, her only job, to be there and attend to him. And besides, he needed her so much.
Contributor's Note: William Barclay lives in Santa Monica and sometimes in Ridgecrest.
