3:30: Nate
“Is it true about Adam?” Nate asked.
A barber, even one isolated in a hotel room, was expected to know things.
“I don’t know,” Carl said.
From his wallet Nate produced a photograph of his children, posed in an artificial bower. The girl was skinny, with dark circles beneath her eyes, and she clung like a castaway to the gleaming trunk of a synthetic tree.
“Nice,” Carl said.
“Turns out she was allergic to that plastic bark,” Nate said. “She’s allergic to everything, though. When we were kids, Carl — do you remember? — there was one, maybe two allergies.”
“Bees,” Carl said, trimming the hair above Nate’s ear.
“That’s right,” Nate said. He seemed to be making a moral argument. “There was that kid who bragged that he would die if he got stung. Then there was pollen, and maybe cats. And that was it. That was all. And now I’ve got a kid who is allergic to crayons and dust.”
Carl stood and moved behind Nate’s chair. He nodded, though there was no mirror.
“Aren’t we supposed to become better adapted through generations?” Nate said. He sounded troubled. He seemed to be suggesting that children today did not share our values.
Out in the hallway, something or someone slammed hard against the door, and the men laughed and coughed. Then Nate told a story. The story began with a kind of rustling or scuttling sound in the basement. Carl gritted his teeth. God help me, he thought, this is going to be a story about an animal in the house. Carl had been at the hotel for a little more than twenty-four hours, and he had already heard six or seven stories about animals in houses, identical in dramatic contour — the strange noise or scat or smell, the mystery, the false hypothesis, the persistence, the breakthrough, the discovery, the grim and triumphant resolution. The unstated moraclass="underline" It’s my house. But Carl tried to be patient, he did. He understood that each animal in each house felt unique to the home owner. A man with an animal in his house is an archetype. He joins a long narrative tradition, and yet for each particular man in each particular house the event is not allegory. It is an urgent and singular encounter, exceptional and unrepeatable. Carl remembered very clearly the bats in his own attic. Those terrible little fingers. He knew that each man was entitled to his story about an animal in the house, and he tried to pay attention, tried to nod and sound surprised when it turned out to be a raccoon. “Are you serious?” Carl said. “What did you do then?” Nate had good hair, and it was a pleasure to cut. He had, at least in the decade that Carl had known him, always parted his hair in the middle. It was time, Carl thought, for a change.
3:45: Adam
(Carl was worried that he was dying, though he was not. He stood in his room by the door. He could hear the men in the hallway — it must be nearly all of them, maybe more — but nobody knocked. He placed his clippers on top of the television. His hands were covered with graying hair and streaks of black marker. He walked to the window, and looked out at the parking lot. The sky had descended, and seemed now to rest upon the hotel, raining upon it. The day was growing dark, and Carl pulled the curtains together. The sign-up sheet was posted on the outside of the room’s door, and Carl did not know which men were waiting in line, or how many. He did not necessarily enjoy cutting hair anymore, if he ever did, but he continued out of a sense of obligation. He put three pills on his tongue, sprayed water into his mouth from the spray bottle. He lay on his bed and closed his eyes. He should not have attended his high school reunion last month. That had been a mistake. The best-case scenario was that Carl was halfway through his life. It was alternately a comfort and a terror to consider that you were halfway through your life, but at any rate it was not an accurate concept. You were never actually halfway through your life. Not really. Not in the sense that you were halfway though a cord of winter firewood, or a tank of gas, or a trip home from the beach, or the one cocktail you allowed yourself on a weeknight. Halfway through something, that is, whose wholeness is a given, preexistent. You were always, instant by instant, at the very edge of your life, at the end of it, in its entirety, and so never at any point, Carl considered, in the middle. Adam did not show up. Perhaps the rumor was true. It would certainly not be the first time that a man had been retrieved, though this time felt more grave, Carl thought. He imagined an automotive fleet in tight highway formation, steadily approaching the hotel. A wave of relations, each determined to find a man and bring him home.)
4:00: Randy
Randy sat in the chair between the beds. The chair was now encircled by a thick ring of cut hair. He felt as if he were in a nest. Carl sprayed Randy’s hair, and combed it straight forward. Water dripped from Randy’s nose. Carl leaned down in front of Randy to cut the bangs across Randy’s forehead. Randy confessed, as Carl knew he would. He told Carl the truth about the Jeff Bostic uniform. “It’s true that I sold it,” he said, telling the story from the beginning, or well before it. And in the six minutes he had remaining in his appointment, he had other things to tell Carl, as well. In forty-six years Randy had done any number of things of which he was ashamed. There was nothing interesting, nothing unusual. Carl had heard it all many times. Randy had lied, he had stolen, he had cheated, he had hurt people who loved him. He had once peed in a bottle of Mellow Yellow, knowing full well his older sister would ask him for a drink. . If he wanted, Randy, like everyone else, could tell his life story as an outright spree of wickedness and deceit.
4:15: Dennis
Dennis was a business traveler, staying alone on the second floor. He sat quietly for his trim. Out in the hallway, the men had dispersed, leaving behind some trash and a notable silence. Carl concentrated on the hair of Dennis, and he cut well, though it depleted him. Dennis’s cough drop gradually filled the room with its scent of medicine and childhood. The smell had not changed in decades. It must be the case that people did not actually want cough drops to taste like cherry, like lemon. In the absence of much ambient noise, the smell of the cough drop began nearly to drone. Suddenly, Dennis said something. He asked Carl if he would mind trimming his eyebrows. Carl could think of no reason to refuse, and he trimmed the eyebrows, holding his breath to steady his hands. When the appointment was over, Carl wiped Dennis’s neck and ears with a towel. He carefully removed the cape. “There you go,” he said, as barbers do. Dennis nodded, stood. For some time he stared at a watercolor of horses in a pasture, as if at a mirror. Carl sat on the bed. Dennis reached for his wallet, and Carl braced himself for more photographs of children. It was more than he could handle. Dennis removed fourteen dollars from his wallet, and placed the bills on the bedside table.