Hardscrabble Road(46)

It was cold in the room, so cold Gregor thought his hands were turning into icicles. He wanted to touch his hair to make sure it was in place. Maybe if he did that he would be able to remember the words. Maybe he had never had the words. He didn’t want to give a speech. He didn’t want to talk to cynocephali, either. He didn’t think he had a lot in common with them. He didn’t think he had much to say even to people he did have a lot in common with.

It was cold because the window was partially open. He could see the crack at the base of the sill. There was a bit of paper stuck there, waving in the wind that was coming through. He tried to sit up and realized he was lying flat on his face. A moment later, he saw that his face was on his pillow, the window that was open was in his own bedroom, and the cynocephali were nowhere but in his imagination, planted there by Tibor discussing the travel narratives that had circulated throughout Europe in the twelfth century, in the wake of the Crusades.

Gregor turned over on his back, sat up, and looked around. The room was ridiculously dark, in spite of the fact that there was a streetlight right outside his window, which usually made it unnecessary for him to turn on a light when he wanted to go to the bathroom in the night. He switched on the lamp on the night table on what he had come to think of as “his” side of the bed. Then he looked over to the other side and wondered how he’d managed to sleep for as long as he had—he had no idea how long that was—without disturbing it. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he had gone to sleep without turning down the covers, getting himself undressed, or in any way preparing himself for what was supposed to be a long period of quiet. He had a feeling he had had no quiet at all, and it wasn’t just the cynocephali.

He hadn’t taken his shoes off, either. They were still on his feet, hard-edged penny loafers Bennis thought would look better on him than his old wingtips. He got himself upright and his legs off the side of the bed. He kicked his shoes off and then bent over to take off his socks. The clock on the bedside table said 4:46. He presumed that was a.m. Surely, if he’d slept through breakfast at the Ararat and then missed his ten o’clock appointment with John Jackman, somebody would have come looking for him. It really was cold in here. It was freezing. Could he have turned the heat off in a daze when he’d wandered in a couple of hours ago?

He got up, shrugged off his jacket, but didn’t bother to undress any farther. He went out of the bedroom and down the dark hall to the thermostat. The thermostat said sixty-eight degrees, but it didn’t feel like sixty-eight degrees. He jacked it up to seventy-eight, because he could always turn the heat down again if he needed to. Then he went the rest of the way down the hall to the bathroom. If he’d told Bennis about feeling cold like this, she’d say he was coming down with something, and maybe he was. He’d just spent several hours standing around in a morgue refrigerated to a point where even somebody who’d spent days exposed to this February chill would think somebody was overdoing it, and in the end he had gotten absolutely nowhere on any front he considered important.

He hesitated in the bathroom doorway, realized what he’d forgotten, and went back to the bedroom. He got boxer shorts, an undershirt, a robe, and a pair of sweatpants out of his drawers and went back to the bathroom again. He wasn’t operating on all eight cylinders, as Tommy Moradanyan Donahue would say, and yet he’d be willing to bet that Tommy had no idea what “all eight cylinders” meant, having never encountered a car with more than six. Or maybe he had.

I’m losing my mind, Gregor thought. He shut the bathroom door, turned on the shower as hot as he could make it without scalding himself, and then began to strip off his clothes and throw them in the various hampers Bennis had set out to contain them: whites here, darks there, dry cleaning in a third place. He was sure he’d had a sweater when he’d gone to see John first thing yesterday morning, but he had no sweater now, and he had no idea what had happened to it. Steam was rising out of the shower stall in great white billows. He opened the stall door and stepped in under the water, instantly warmed. He was tired, that was all that was the matter with him. He hadn’t come in until one thirty, and then he’d fallen asleep in his clothes, and now it was not very many hours later, and he knew he wasn’t going back to sleep. He didn’t think he’d be able to go back to sleep even if the mayor hadn’t come down to the morgue and virtually threatened him with death.

Actually, literally, what the mayor had threatened him with was jail.

The water was too hot. If he was fully conscious, he would be worried about being burned. Now he wasn’t. He let the water fall over his head in cascading sheets and found himself happy for the warmth of it. He wanted everything in his life to be warm. He wanted to move to someplace like Orlando, or Palm Springs, where it was never cold at all unless you walked into a meat locker, and then you had a temperature gauge to play with if you wanted that to change.