Our room was fancy, in the thick-carpeted, glossy-tabled way of these places. Our window, which didn’t open, looked over a covered-up lap pool and, beyond that, a traffic circle.
“Do you remember that weekend when we went to a craft fair with my parents? Was that in Baltimore? I remember we stayed at the Hyatt. It was the first time I’d ever stayed in a hotel room separate from theirs. You called the front desk and pretended the toilet was overflowing. We tried to stay up all night.”
The first thing I said, and I said it more to the room than to him, was: “I’m gonna shower.”
I left the bathroom door cracked open, so I could keep an eye on Thomas in the mirror; he was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his eyes closed, his hands resting palms up on his knees. This was the first scalding, high-pressure water that I’d felt in I didn’t know how long. I scrubbed my entire body, rinsed off, then scrubbed my entire body again. Maybe I was the one feeling like a murderer. Every minute or two a memory from the Batras’ would pierce me like a needle hidden in the washcloth. She counted the brushes of her hair. She would tease me for my belly. Enough. No. I couldn’t, I told myself, have made it more than a decade if what had happened, what I’d done, was actually as awful as it just then seemed. Get through tonight, get through tomorrow, sleep; then worry about bigger things. Or maybe don’t.
“You should shower,” I said, walking out into the room wrapped in towels, pulling back on my only pair of boxers.
“No, thank you.”
“Get in the shower.”
“All right.”
What I needed, I’d decided, other than to get the two of us home, was to make sure that his truth-telling mission was over. Which is to say: I needed to confirm that Thomas didn’t intend to tell his parents anything about what had happened here. I didn’t think he would (his parents still seemed to exist for him in a reality-distortion field), but I needed to be sure, and my need to be sure was like a bad stomachache. Or I had a bad stomachache, which was somehow tangled up with my need to be sure in a way that was making the feeling even more intolerable than it would have been on its own.
I sat down on the bed and turned on the BBC, my first TV since home. Someone, or multiple someones, was renewing an economic treaty in East Asia. Someone else was no longer considering running for prime minister of Portugal. Then there were crowds and crushed metal and police barricades; apparently there had been a train accident in Jaipur. A correspondent stood outside the hospital.
“They’ve been counting the dead all night, after the most horrific accident in a year that’s had no shortage …”
I must have fallen asleep for a second, or a wire in my brain must have misfired. Suddenly there were tears in my eyes, and for some reason I was standing up. At first I thought I’d heard Thomas leaving, but he was still in the shower; the bathroom door was still closed. “And now, a look at the world markets,” the anchor said, and I noticed that I was squeezing the remote so hard that my fingertips were red.
The world markets were doing very poorly.
The human rights people who say that sleeplessness really is a kind of torture, not to be treated any less seriously than waterboarding or starvation, are right. The question of when I’d last gotten a significant quantity of sleep was beyond my computing abilities at that moment, but it had been a couple of days, at least. Pathways in me were corroding. Brain surfaces were drying out like old oranges. There’s a level of exhaustion at which you could sleep through your own execution and I seemed, maybe because of a Pavlovian response to touching the bed, to have arrived there all at once.
The next thing I remember is lying on my bed, too tired, or too confused, to figure out how to get under anything other than the top comforter. The TV was off now. And I remember seeing Thomas on his bed, not asleep, lying on his back. Every now and then he’d say something, but I could only sort of mentally bat at whatever he’d said, like a balloon passing overhead.
“The strangest part of this,” he said, “has been that I keep forgetting who I am. That’s one way he said you know you’re ready. Someone asked me my name and I had to stop and think.”
And: “Do you remember when we used to sit out in the driveway and pretend to fight when cars passed?”
And: “The only time I ever really saw my dad so mad that I was scared was when I asked him what it felt like to kill someone.”
And, some time later: “Do you think he forgave us? I didn’t expect him to, but I think there has to be peace in knowing. What do you think?”
All throughout this, the lights in the room were blazing. Really, they were the brightest lights I’d ever seen. Could they possibly have been like that when we’d come in? It was like trying to sleep inside a bonfire. I spent minutes, like someone crawling toward a doorway, summoning the energy to beg Thomas to get up and turn them off. And then, even though I’m fairly sure I didn’t say anything, he did. Or they went off, anyway. Oh, it was so sweet, like having my brain bathed in the most delicious blue-black liquor. All is coolness.