The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  On the day before she was supposed to fly back to London, Alice came and saw me perform at the Laugh Factory. On Wednesdays, they have this five-minute set thing with about thirty comedians, and everyone goes up, one after the other. It’s pretty rough, and there’s usually a lot of drunks chattering in the front tables, but I did all right, some dumb extended joke about why I quit playing professional basketball, having lost my passion for the game.

  Afterward we sat at the bar. She said, “That was pretty good.”

  “Pretty thank you.”

  “Pretty you’re welcome. I have to say, though, you don’t seem like a typical comedian.”

  “No?” I said. “Lumpy with a Jewfro? I’m the model.”

  “Yeah, but not unhappy. I’ve known a few comedians. You’re not an asshole and not suicidally depressed.”

  “You don’t have to be depressed; that’s bullshit.”

  “Yeah?” She sipped her drink.

  “I mean, do you have to be depressed to be a good welder? A good figure skater?”

  “Maybe. And you know that’s different.”

  I laughed. “I like to be happy, sue me.”

  “There’s your problem,” she said. “That’s why you’ll never be good.”

  Just then, another comedian stopped by and invited us to a party one of the Groundlings was throwing in Coldwater Canyon. We settled the bill, got in the car, and drove up, miraculously finding a parking spot right outside. Everything was light and fun, but I stopped pacing myself and, okay, might have gotten a little bit drunk. On the back porch, as we were sharing a smoke to the strains of Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” I said, “That’s why I’ll never be good, huh?”

  “What?” She was looking down the steep backyard, a tangled grove of lemon trees and birds of paradise.

  “You said I would never be good.”

  “No. I said trying really hard to be happy is why you’ll never be good.”

  “That’s such a fucked-up thing to say.” She shrugged, and I went on. “But I guess you’re a screwed-up person, right? It’s probably why you’re so good at what you do.”

  “You’re drunk, Noah.”

  “That’s what you think, though, isn’t it?”

  In a practiced, casual motion, she flicked the cigarette off the porch and said, “What I think is that people running from themselves don’t make good art. I think you’re extremely invested in being laid-back and cheerful, and I think that comes at a cost. Maybe it’s worth it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Okay, that’s better,” she said, and she may have said something else, but I was walking through the scrum of the party, pushing past a couple making out on the stairs and moving down the driveway and street, letting gravity and my drunkenness lower me down the long hill, walking down Hollywood, down Sunset, past the Seventh Veil and a pair of prostitutes on stilt-like heels catcalling me and laughing when I flipped them off, trudging past Kaiser Permanente and the Scientology center, and finally, at three in the morning, collapsing half drunk in my bed to not sleep the rest of the night.

  The next day, with a hangover like an itchy wool shirt worn under my skin, I took two Ativan and drove south, all the way down to San Diego. It felt good to escape LA’s summer clinch, and cresting the hills in La Jolla, the temperature dropped ten degrees. I parked alongside the Pacific Beach Boardwalk and took Ernie down to the ocean, where we lay in the sand between two rival gangs of sunbathing teenagers.

  Sedated by the heat and the sedatives I’d taken, Ernie panting by my side, I drifted into one of those strange zones between sleep and waking. Very clearly, I was back in my old bedroom, in the cottage. It was winter—strange to feel the cold and the warm sand simultaneously—and the wind clattered the shutters outside the window. It sounded like someone trying to get in. I’d childishly begged Susannah to sleep with me on those windy nights, but she’d long ago told me to grow up and shut up, and so I had. And then, one night, came the man.

  I was lying sleepless in bed when outside my window was this weird yellow light. My bedroom faced the woods, so I couldn’t think what it could be. It got a little brighter, then went dark, and I was about to get out of bed when the window opened. It was so unreal—the hand entering, then the arm, a foot delicately thrown over the sill, a black boot, then the dark figure pushing through and standing there—that for a moment, I hadn’t screamed. I’d just stared, knowing I was having a nightmare. But usually the moment you realize you’re dreaming is the moment you wake up, and I hadn’t. The man had just stood there staring at me, and I at him. Then I’d tried to scream but couldn’t, could only lie there silent and shaking.

  He approached the bed and leaned over. He put his hands around my neck and began squeezing, suffocating me slowly, and there was nothing I could do about it. I closed my eyes and submitted. Only then did the pressure ease, and when I opened my eyes again he was gone without any evidence he’d been there, other than the barest smudge of snow on the carpet, which melted away. I wasn’t able to sleep for a week after that. When I told my parents, they told me it was a nightmare, and that was almost the worst part, that they didn’t believe me.

  The man returned several more times over the years, then no more. Now, twenty years later, he was back and I was eight again, seeing the glow outside, squeezing my eyes, hearing the window open, willing him away, willing myself to a remote beach like the one I dimly sensed beneath me. Trying to scream but making only a whimper. Thrashing and thrashing, my muscles barely twitching. The man standing there, getting closer, on top now, smiling down at me.

  The girls on either side startled up from their sunbathing at the man jumping up from the sand and jogging out into the ocean some twenty yards away. I waded fully clothed out into the waves and must have presented a disturbing enough scene to send a young lifeguard trotting out. He brought me in under his tanned, muscular wing to a smattering of mild applause. People watched for a minute but lost interest as I walked Ernie back up to the boardwalk—just another loony drawn to the beach, nothing to see here. Soaked through, I rolled down the windows and drove, shivering, back to LA. When I got to the hotel, Alice was packing, almost ready to leave.

  “Hey,” she said. “What happened to you?”

  “I told you the first night, I want to help you.”

  “I think you might be the one that needs help.”

  “Help me help you help me.”

  “Come in.”

  Once again she turned on the recorder, once again Ernie settled under my feet, but this time I had a story for her. How the man started coming at night. How when I told my parents, they said it was a nightmare. And how when I kept having this nightmare, they hired a therapist who diagnosed sleep paralysis. Victims of hypnagogia often, he said, suffer the delusion of someone in the room with them, someone holding them down. He even brought in a reproduction of an old painting called The Nightmare, in which a little gray ogre perches on top of a prostrate damsel. A terrifying painting, and a small comfort, considering I knew what was happening wasn’t a delusion.

  How, after weeks and months of these therapy sessions, I began to believe my psychologist. When the light outside appeared, I closed my eyes and thought about other things—playing on a sunny beach with friends from school—and I could almost convince myself that the footsteps in the room and the hands on my neck were just some other, renegade part of my imagination. After all, if the man was real, why hadn’t he killed me, why hadn’t he gone after my sister or my parents?

  And how, finally, on one morning in the spring, by which point I had convinced myself it really was just a nightmare, the nightmare left something behind: an old military flashlight. A small green metal box with a hinged clip on the rear—it must have slipped from his jacket and fallen under the bed. I pressed the little red button and it turned on, casting the room in the ghostly yellow light that announced his arrival outside my window. It was both terrifying to know the man was real and gratifying to know I hadn’t created him, that
he didn’t dwell in the recesses of my consciousness. I figured I’d tell my parents at breakfast, but I didn’t. The flashlight stayed where I’d put it, in my closet, inside a box of old baseball cards.

  “Why didn’t you show it to them?”

  “I guess I knew he’d realize he’d lost it, and somehow that would mean he wouldn’t be back. But also, what if I showed them and they still didn’t believe me? What if it was like the nightmares? Not having them believe me—to go on doubting myself—would have been the scariest thing of all. Does that make sense?”

  She nodded. “It does to me.”

  I reached in my pocket and pulled it out, the flashlight. I turned it on and the hotel room was suffused with that weird glow. “I’ve held on to it ever since. After all these years, it still works. To remind me I’m not crazy, to trust myself. Because, you know, I was right. He never did come back after that.”

  She took the light from my hand and held it in front of her. “I remember this from the basement.”

  “It’s the same person.”

  “Yes.”

  She got up and poured us both wine in plastic hotel cups, and we drank together listening to the AC hum. “You understand that what I’m writing will hurt our family, right? I don’t want you to be blindsided. I like you.”

  “I like you, too.” Outside the window, a line of birds perched on the building next door took flight, and their shadows fell like water. “And I don’t care if it hurts them.”

  “No?”

  Ernie shifted under me. I wiped my eyes and took a breath. “I think the place is evil. I think they’re hiding something; they’ve been hiding something for a long time. I want to know who did this to us.”

  She rolled her suitcase down to the lobby, and I followed with Ernie. Her airport Uber arrived and we embraced one more time; then she was gone. I was almost home before I realized she’d taken the flashlight with her.

  16. Ensemble

  2012

  By eight in the morning, the snow had completely blanketed the ground outside the cottage, accumulating overnight on the exterior windowsills and around the edges as well, creating a cozy, enclosed feeling inside. Len looked through one of these snow holes at the side of the Neversink—a pure white blanket now. It covers everything, he thought, inanely. They were big, wet flakes, the kind that stuck instantly; in less than four hours, they’d undone years of neglect, hiding the graffiti and kudzu and ruin—the building looked like a giant overfrosted birthday cake. He’d built himself a fire and put on some old jazz records. Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue, Etta James Sings for Lovers.

  Drinking his tea, he hoped the weather would cancel the meeting scheduled later with Alice. She’d called several times over the last month, leaving message after message. But she’d finally gotten him on the line, and he hadn’t been able to say no to family. Sure, he’d said, late afternoon on Sunday works. He supposed he owed her that much, despite his misgivings. She was writing some kind of book about or involving the hotel, she’d said, and he suspected, given what had happened to her, that it wouldn’t be flattering, her assurances that it would only be “to tie up some loose ends” notwithstanding.

  The phone rang, a rare occurrence. Len said, “Hello.”

  “It’s Saul.”

  “Saul!” Len hadn’t seen or talked to Javits in almost five years. His voice was the same, instantly familiar in its brisk nasality. As they caught up on pleasantries, Len walked into the kitchen and put another kettle of water on the stove.

  “Len,” said Saul, abruptly. “I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk, we’re talking.”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “Okay, sounds mysterious.”

  “Can I come by?”

  “What, today? Weather report says twelve inches, maybe more.”

  “I’m already out. You got time around noon?”

  “Hang on, let me see.” Len didn’t have anything going on until five, when Alice was due. He never, for that matter, had much going on since turning the golf course operations over to his daughter and officially retiring. But it stoked some uselessly tenacious part of his ego to continue keeping up the appearance that he wasn’t doing nothing, that he wasn’t just drinking tea and listening to Coltrane and watching the snow fall outside. He thumbed through a phone book on the table, riffling the pages, and said, “Yeah, noon works.”

  “See you then.”

  Old Javits, he thought. What could he possibly want? Saul Javits, like everyone else, had drifted away with the closing of the hotel. They’d stayed in touch for a while, having a beer now and then, but at some point Javits and his wife (dubbed “Lady Saul” by Rachel years ago) had moved from Liberty to somewhere farther out in the country, and that had been that. When Lady Saul had died five years ago, Len had attended the funeral, also attended by Rachel. Over a glass of wine at the reception afterward, Rachel and he had agreed that Javits looked terrible, not just haggard from the grief, but old, shockingly old. He could only imagine what the man looked like now, though he supposed he wouldn’t have to.

  At precisely noon, Javits arrived, and his appearance didn’t disappoint. His ancient head poked out of a thick sweatshirt made of burgundy velour, and the effect was that of a large walnut being carried around on a royal pillow. He held a thick manila envelope, which he set on the sofa without comment; Len figured he’d let Javits—a chatterbox who drifted off into wild tangents by way of finally getting to a point—tell him what it was when he was ready. Kicking the snow from his boots, he shook Len’s hand, and Len remembered how much he’d always liked Javits, how much he’d really missed him. It all just got away from you.

  “Coffee?” said Len.

  “How about a beer?”

  “I gave that up years ago. Too easy to sit around all day drinking.”

  “Why not, though? Any reason not to drink beer these days, all day if you want? Who’s to stop you?”

  “That’s the problem. And I was getting fat. Worrying Suse.”

  “How is Susannah?”

  “She’s fine. Running the course. Dating a local policeman, if you can believe that.”

  “Long as she’s happy, right? That’s what I tell myself, anyway, though I’m not sure I believe it, but what can you do?”

  “God, yes. She’s thirty-seven, you believe that?”

  “My Samara’s fifty-something. Unbelievable.”

  “It’s terrible,” he laughed, but Javits worried his gnarled hands, and Len saw that something was really bothering him. “You sure I can’t get you anything, Saul?”

  “Listen, I have to tell you something, and I don’t know how to do it. But I don’t know what else to do. I couldn’t do it over the phone, so here I am. But now that I’m here, I don’t know where to start.”

  The fact that Javits—reliably voluble, even at his wife’s funeral—seemed lost for words was frightening. Len said, “What is it?”

  Javits took a breath and cast a longing look outside, where snow hung from dead tree branches like clumps of blue spun sugar. “Okay. Has Alice contacted you?”

  “Emmenthaler?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, matter of fact, we’re meeting this afternoon around five.”

  “Don’t do it, call it off.”

  “Saul, what the hell is going on?”

  “Oh, Lenny,” Javits hung his shrunken head. “I messed up.”

  In the distance, up on the hill, snow tumbled off the hotel façade in disintegrating chunks that swirled in the wind as they fell. Len felt a terrible dread, as though something large but hidden was about to clarify itself in his field of vision. He said, “Talk.”

  And for the next thirty minutes, Javits did. At the end of it, he handed Len the manila envelope. “It’s all in there,” he concluded. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Get out of here,” said Len.

  “Lenny, you know I love you, and I loved your mother. Give me a call after you’ve had a chance to look at it all, an
d let me know if I can help with—”

  “Get out of here,” Len yelled, and there was more, but Javits was already hurrying out the door, already climbing back up the low hill, already getting in his truck, already turning the key and cranking the engine to drown out Len’s voice, although Len hadn’t come outside, he saw. Was he yelling that loud, or was it still ringing in Javits’s head? He peeled out for a few seconds, but gained traction and managed to fishtail up onto the road. It occurred to him, as the hotel, hulking white in his rearview, disappeared behind the trees after the first looping curve, that he’d probably never see it—or Len—again. Balking at that line of thought, he focused his attention on the drive, trying to get home in one piece, the roads on the way back to Newburgh being a mess, a complete mess. He hunched over the wheel, as though the extra few inches might make a difference in his reaction time, but he was going only twenty miles an hour, anyway. And besides, maybe it would be for the best if he just skidded gracefully into the ravine to his right.

  “Goddamn you,” he said to himself.

  He’d betrayed his oldest friend, then delivered news that would probably destroy him. It was Alice’s fault. She’d put the seed in his head when she’d gotten in touch a year ago, telling him what Noah had told her, talking about what she’d already figured out. She’d asked him what he knew, and he’d told her he’d look into it, just to get her off his back. The same way he had with that Lucy woman, way back in the seventies, after which he’d left well enough alone, had put it out of his mind and gotten on with the business of life: working at the hotel, raising his kids, grieving Jeanie’s death, fixing up the house, helping close the hotel, going on little vacations with Hedda, and for the last few years, living alone as a bachelor. But sitting there at his desk, looking through the yellowy files Lucy had brought by the hotel and that he’d immediately stashed away in the basement—the microfiche copies of newspaper accounts, the police reports—he felt he was, at last, fulfilling his false promise to the woman and finishing the work she’d started forty years earlier. He talked to old cops he knew, retired from Liberty PD, and a homicide-beat writer up in Albany. He went through housing and bank records. He began to put it all together. Was it merely boredom, some lingering bit of ego, a need to feel useful? Whatever the case, what he found was compelling and had the smell of truth about it, some indiscernible character of factuality, the small, strange details that clicked like the tumblers of an invisible lock, and behind it, the echoing memory of Lucy’s words: Children don’t just disappear; do your goddamned job. He’d been so close before, had been on the verge of looking into it, talking to Jeanie about it, but had put it off, telling himself give it a day and see how you feel. And soon thereafter Jeanie was really sick—dying—and he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her, and then she was dead, and in a way it had seemed like problem solved, though looking at the evidence spread out in front of him, he finally admitted the truth: he simply hadn’t wanted to know, had very much not wanted to know, and not knowing was easy, so he hadn’t. Even now, he could barely stand to look at it head-on. But the glittering whiteness of the snow that flew past his windshield was like the truth of the papers that had lain scattered across his dining room table. Going over these facts again and again in his quiet house, he had felt himself in a chain of information passing from the lips of the dead to the ears of the living. A conduit. Many times he considered stopping, but the thought kept pushing him forward that the truth had somehow survived for decades, survived for him to find. It seemed indecent to let this truth dissipate like steam, which it would when he died, and at eighty-seven, how much longer would it be, if he was being honest with himself? For months it ate at him, kept him up at night. At last he called Alice back. Like a dog, he’d done exactly as she’d asked, returning a juicy bone to her waiting hand, and in doing so he’d destroyed his oldest friend.