Meanwhile other people now drive your freeway to and from work, and live in your old house, and repaint the walls and tear down your shelves, and the planet spins.
— «» — «» — «»—
One day, after a particularly arduous trip to and from the john, when she was settled back in her chair and looking exhausted and small and ashamed, his grandmother had looked at the boy and said:
'It's a pity He puts the worst bit at the end.' He hadn't understood immediately, but had done seven months later when he sat quietly behind one of the chairs in the living room, two hours after coming back from Grandma's funeral. He had been sitting there a while, thinking about the old lady, when his mother came into the room holding a record. She went over to the player, turned it on, and then sat in a chair and listened.
He was severely freaked. He didn't know what to do. He knew this was a private moment of his mother's and she would not take at all well to finding she was not alone. He knew this especially when he heard something that might have been his mother crying. He had never heard his mother cry before. He never heard it again.
So he just sat, and listened.
His mother sat through the recording once, from start to finish. Then she got up, wrenched the record off the player and threw it viciously into a corner, where it smashed into many pieces.
She stormed out. The front door slammed.
When she was safely external he cautiously emerged from behind the chair. His body told him to get the hell gone from the room, go upstairs, go out, do something, but his mind said his mother was halfway to a bar already and it wanted to know what the music had been. The mind won.
He stepped over to the record player to look at the sleeve. It was Faur?'s Requiem, and he recognized it from Grandma's room, one of the few possessions she'd brought to their house. The sleeve was old and battered, and it looked like the record had been pulled out and replaced a great many times, back in her real life, when she got to choose what music was played within her hearing. Perhaps it was this that made him go over to the corner, pick up one of the biggest fragments of the shattered disc, and take it with him back up to his bedroom: a realization that there would come a time when he would be controlled by others once more, and that the time in between was all he had.
He was twelve years old. Four years later, Faur?'s Requiem was the first album he bought. By his late teens it was already something he played only privately. Faur? was one of those composers, he had learned, who was a little too well known. It was like putting on Vivaldi's Four Seasons, or Beethoven's Fifth or Bach's Air on a G String. You wound up looking ignorant no matter how much you actually liked it, because you were surrounded by people who valued ideas — including the idea that they were clever and unusual and not just part of the common mass — rather than experience. People who thought it was better to admire something than to actually like it, who either lived a life of constant fragility, or indulged themselves in private.
People who did not have the courage to realize that if they acted powerfully enough, they could tip the planet.
It was not long before he left those people, all people, far behind, when he found the smoking road. Listening to his mother, and hearing those strange, ugly/beautiful sounds coming from inside her, that had been real. That had been something that was happening, a real-time incident, a change in the world's colour as his grandmother's death scraped its indelible mark on reality. It had been like a glimpse of a distant lake or sleeping girl or grubby street corner, frank and vulnerable in its simple truth.
Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler; merely a message from our sponsor.
The old woman's death said something, especially as he knew the fall which had finally killed the old lady had not been purely accidental. She was being helped down the stairs, after all, and he had heard her say 'No' urgently, once, just before she fell.
But then everything was quiet for her, and she no longer cried out in the night or soiled herself, and her ragged breathing was no more. She was put in the ground and slept easily, and she must surely have known, in some way or another, that her daughter had cried for her after she was gone.
The worst bit didn't have to be at the end, that much was clear. It didn't have to be quiet and pointless. So long as there was someone there who cared, the end didn't have to be so bad at all.
So why wait?
— «» — «» — «»—
When he got to the city he parked. He walked some distance to his destination. He kept on the move, because movement was best. Even now, this part of the process was strange and ungovernable, and a lesser man might have entertained the idea this was because the impulse was coming from somewhere other than his conscious mind. Not him. He knew it all made sense, that sometimes this was what we are for.
He walked. He waited for the night. He waited so that someone else special would no longer have to wait. He was actually doing it for his own reasons, of course, and for wider-reaching benefits, but that didn't stop it being the right thing for her too. Everything would be fresh, and all would be quiet.
It was truly a no-lose situation.
17
The elevator opened. Burt was standing inside. He grinned and stood back to let Katelyn in, then realized he had to get out with his big cart and that this had to happen first regardless of the dictates of his code of chivalry. He hesitated, went back and forward an inch or two, then rolled his eyes and shrugged. This, or something like it, happened pretty much every night.
He apologetically clanked his way out and then turned back to hold the doors open. 'Fetching the menus, Ma'am?'
'That's right, Burt. How's your night?'
'Getting it done.'
Burt was the Seattle Fairview's only black employee apart from the much celebrated Big Ron, the daytime concierge. Katelyn liked Burt. He was twice as old as anyone else on the payroll and worked twice as hard, even at gone three in the morning. If you saw Burt, he'd be doing something. The idea of him at rest was absurd.
Reassured that she was safely in the elevator, he winked and trundled off, on his way to fix something or re-attach something or scrape something off. Katelyn watched him as the doors closed. He was a night toiler too, and something told her he felt the same as she did, the same sense of being in a special position. She'd never asked because, well, you just didn't.
Or was that too simple? Did she believe such an observation lay outside the terms of their working relationship, and if so, why? Did it say something bad about her? Was hierarchy more important to her than she'd thought? Or was she patronizing him without realizing it, not taking him seriously because he was old or…
Christ, it was too late now.
— «» — «» — «»—
This was not a job for the night manager, she knew. Some hotels left it to the bell boy, a final errand before he knocked off; or, if there was 24/7 room service, sometimes the overnight cook would put the machine on in the dead zone around four a.m. and fetch them himself, most likely wandering the corridors with his pants down, judging by the night cooks she'd met. One place had asked for the menus to be hung on the door by six, rather than two, and there it had been the first job of the day for the service staff who'd later be running those same breakfasts upstairs. That seemed wrong to her. You might think breakfast was the first event of the new day, but it wasn't. Not for the guests. It was the last thing. They returned from evenings in an unfamiliar city, mid-evening and surly or late and politely shit-faced — guessing which was half of the fun. Katelyn liked to imagine them sprawled hiccupping across the bed, gripping a complimentary biro, brows furrowed with lonely concentration, ticking and annotating. When you were on vacation, or away on business, the arrival of breakfast was of existential significance. It reminded you who you were — or who you'd thought you were, at least, at midnight and full up to the ears with wine.