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This is what's happening when I get to the hotel: it's raining. Big deal, I know. Big fucking deal. My clothes are wet and my hair is wet and I stand there feeling nothing. Just wet hair and cold hands gripping suitcases. Stand there like an ashen city skyscraper, steadfast and unfeeling, draped in fog and gray sky, thinking to myself like I do when I'm alone, conversing with myself like there was someone inside me. I'm talking to this person inside me, telling him about things, helping myself figure out what is happening. This is what I do. This is what I do when there's no one else around, or right now, when I can't talk to anyone else—right now—sure, I'm talking to myself. And I'm thinking, too. About this rain, how it's almost like God is agreeing with what I've been thinking all along. But it's her idea and I can't do anything about it except just tell her it's okay and if she wants to do this—I just tell her I want whatever she wants. Whatever makes her happy—that's what makes me happy. This is how it is when you get married. You share each other's lives and each other's happiness. When one person can be happy—I mean if one of you can be happy—that means both of you can be happy. Anyway there was nothing I could say to her. Nothing I could do about it, even though I didn't think it was a good idea. But now it's like God is agreeing with me, and He's the one that can do something about it. So this is how I find myself. Standing there with my wife, dripping wet in the hotel lobby, the glass doors shut behind me, the sound of water still penetrating the glass and filling the room. My wife, she's holding some bags and there's water on them. She's shivering, I know, because she gets cold so easily, and beneath the gray raincoat and all her sweater and shirt and all that there's goose bumps on her skin. And as I'm thinking about this I look at her and I see her face and I know that she is unhappy and I take a bag off of her shoulder so she doesn't have to hold as much. And I hope that maybe now she can be not so unhappy.
Above the radiator by the bed is the window and I can see the world through a pulled curtain.
I have to do this slowly, but it's like when you've done something so many times you don't even really think about it: I just slide out from under her arms and then sit at the end of the bed and then I start to think. The view is different than usual; there's something else out there, outside the window—it's a new bed we're sleeping in now. The night is outside, fighting the sick yellow-green lamps that paint the parking lot and I'm looking out over the tops of the trees, umbrellas over the white lines painted over thick on the faded asphalt. And out past the one-way street is this big field that unfolds for miles, and there are lights glowing faintly in the distance. The field though, it's surrounded by a big fence with barbed wire spiraling across the top, and to see the lights you have to focus past the fence and the barbed wire. Like you were trying to ignore something. But the thing is, you can't. And now, I'm thinking, here we are. We're in this big hotel now. We made it to this hotel, the two of us, and now we're so close to the water we can hear it all night—a constant rhythm—and we sit on the edge of our bed, gazing past these sickly dyed parking lots, staring through metal fences and across empty space—gazing East, focusing only on what shines in the distance. The two of us, we're focusing on what shines faintly in the distance.
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Lullaby