Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  WITH SOME DIFFICULTY he finds the hotel, ten minutes’ walk from the station, in a side street, above a shop. He climbs the stairs to a dimly lit landing. In the back, under the stairs, is a counter, a rack of keys, a light hanging on a wire, and a bell to ring, that brings an attendant out.

  “I have a room,” he says.

  “What name?” the attendant asks.

  He gives the name they’ve told him.

  The attendant consults one of the scraps of paper on the counter-top, then brings out a key from under the counter.

  “Deux jours en avance,” the attendant says, and names an unexpectedly high rate. But he doesn’t care. He pays the money, and he takes the key, and finds his room at the end of a windowless corridor on the third floor.

  For a day he sleeps. He wakes and eats and washes himself with water from the sink, cleans his clothes with soap, and lays them on the floor where the sun comes through.

  The afternoon passes. He has nothing to do. He stands at the second-floor hotel window, looking out at a strange city. He wonders which way to face. From where will the end of his waiting come?

  Here he is no one. He thinks, If I died on the street nobody would bury me.

  He imagines his mother standing on the stair leading down from the verandah. He imagines her returning into the house, getting on her knees by her bed.

  He sits in his room and waits. He waits for a knock on the door. He goes down and asks whether anyone has come for him. He walks round the block so that he can ask again on his return. But it’s always the same: “Personne. Pas encore”—he has only to pass through the lobby for the attendant, not looking up, to tell him.

  He lies on the bed and smokes cigarette after cigarette as the light comes through the drawn curtains, growing blunt.

  He traces the wiring all over the walls, and the scars where the old wiring used to be, like dried rivers.

  The mosquito net above the bed is tied in a large knot, hanging from the roof from its hoop. The gathered gauze is looped into a bunch and fastened round itself, so that it looks like a head resting on a shoulder, held in an embrace.

  Is it possible his heart will let him off? he wonders, but knows it will not.

  He shuts his eyes. He thinks of Celeste—not as he left her, but much before that.

  From the first time he saw her.

  Turning him into a boy, and her into a schoolgirl, sitting on the edge of a tall chair, flipping her legs while she waited her turn in the Christ Call Ventures Telecentre.

  Who was that? he asks himself. Who was that then?

  The girl flipping her legs—what was it like not to know her?

  And he remembers when she stood up from the chair, how he couldn’t stop watching, and missed his turn in the queue. And later, after she’d made her call, how she walked out with a friend, and they were laughing at him, because they’d seen him looking. And how her body had folded in its laughter, and he saw her shoulder blades rise under the straps of her dress like wings, and how all her movements seemed to join so smoothly together, like a fine cursive hand, like water.

  And then he slips over the border of sleep, and is no longer thinking of her at all, but of water itself. Of the sea. How for a moment he’d seen it from the train, after two days of desert, at the end of the journey. And he’d known he was almost done. It had lifted his heart and calmed him. It had made him forget.

  Why do I love the sea? he wonders.

  Why? For its completeness, for its adaptability, for being capable of filling any space.

  Whenever he thinks of the sea, he feels homesick, though he doesn’t know what for. For a place? For a time in his life? For a time when the sea belonged to him? And he imagines himself standing at the edge of the sea, and thinks that dying would mean no more than wading out into it forever and not coming back.

  Each morning he is ready to leave. He goes through his papers, he packs, he washes—but nobody comes. He pays again for his room. A third night. And then a fourth.

  Late in the evening he goes out to get supplies—cigarettes, sweets, and water. He gets back after midnight and climbs the stairs beside the concierge’s desk, passing the restaurant on his way to his room. The flowery metal door to the bar is closed. A woman is sitting in the warm room with a glass of wine in front of her. The attendant sits at a table closer to the door.

  Can he get a drink, he asks.

  The attendant says that the bar is closed now.

  “No,” the woman says, “he can come in.” She will give him a drink.

  She sounds drunk.

  “Open the door,” she says happily from her table, “pull it.”

  He tries to pull it but it won’t open.

  “No, it is closed,” the attendant says.

  He tries to push it and it gives a centimeter or so but no more. The woman gets up and comes to the door. She wears a black jacket and a dress that shines like metal.

  She opens the door with a hard pull. Her eagerness startles him momentarily. A man comes out of a door marked “Private” a small distance down the corridor behind him. He turns back to look at the man. They look at each other. The man’s face is saying nothing, not interfering.

  “No,” he then decides to say, “I see you are closed. I will come back tomorrow.”

  “Yes, we are closed,” the attendant says.

  “Never mind,” says the woman, and she steps out of the bar. “Come and sit, I want to talk to you,” she says.

  Her hair is braided into slick ringlets.

  “What is your name?” she asks. “I am Janet.”

  She is smiling and laughing as if she is shy and flustered and overwhelmed. They exchange such facts as where they are from.

  “You are alone?” she asks.

  He tells her that he is and she laughs.

  “You don’t want to have me?” she asks, as if he’s already refused her.

  “I cannot,” he tells her.

  “And tomorrow?” she asks.

  “No,” he says, laughing with embarrassment. “Janet, it cannot happen,” and he pats her leg and gets up and goes to the stairs and starts climbing to his room.

  When he turns back he can hear his heart beating in his ears. She has climbed two steps up from the landing, following him.

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  He looks at her, and she holds his look, and then drops it and laughs shyly.

  They don’t talk again until they are in his room. He sits on the bed and opens his trousers and pushes her head onto him. She runs her mouth along the length of his penis.

  Then he suddenly grows fearful that he doesn’t want to do this anymore, but pushes the thought to the back of his mind. How could he say no now? He tells her to stop and to take her dress off and not to bother with anything else.

  He stands behind her, reaches down, to his surprise finds her wet, and enters her. Later he comes out of her and he pushes her back down into an arch and enters her anus.

  She says “no” softly, but does not try to move. He is holding her lightly. He can feel the resistance of her flesh, but he carries on, lifting his hands up her body and holding her buttocks and pushing her abdomen into the bed.

  He starts noticing the tears and flakes in the plaster and buttons in the fake leather bed rest, like small coated chocolates, and then out of the window, the light flashing in the building two blocks away, and then it is all filtered away, and he comes inside of her, and feels his blood banging against his forehead like alcohol.