Players (22 page)

The phone will ring and he will be told to go somewhere. He will be given detailed instructions. The number is known. It has been communicated. Certain assurances have been given. It’s just a matter of time. He’ll get impatient again, no doubt. He’ll resolve to leave. But this time the phone will ring and the voice will give instructions of a detailed nature.

He makes the speech sound
m,
prolonging it, adding a hint of vibrato after a while. Then he laughs again. First light appears, a sense of it, wholly mental perhaps. He doesn’t want day to come, particularly. He makes the sound, not moving his lips, expressionless.

We watch him stand by the bed. The woman has made three visits in the two days he’s had the room. She’s on her stomach now, one arm up on the pillow, the other by her side. Although he’s always known her limits, the unvarying sands of her being, he questions whether his own existence is any more entire. Maybe this amounts to an appreciation of sorts. That the lock of bodies should yield a measure of esteem strikes him as incongruous in this case. He notes her paleness. Downy gloss along her lower spine. She knows things. She isn’t deadened to the core. She knows his soul, for instance.

(In that moment, wearing her white plastic toy, that odd sardonic moment, so closely bordering on cruelty, a playlet of brute revelation, she let him know it was as an instrument, a toy herself, that she appeared. Dil-do. A child’s sleepy murmur. It was as collaborators that they touched, as dreamers in a sea of pallid satisfaction.)

Her complicity makes it possible for him to remain. He stares at the hollows in her buttocks. Dark divide. The ring of flesh that’s buried there. We see him walk to the desk, where he gets the map with the street index attached. He takes it to the chair, stretching his frame.

The idea is to organize this emptiness. In the index he sees Briarfield, Hillsview, Woodhaven, Old Mill, Riverhead, Manor Road, Shady Oaks, Lakeside, Highbrook, Sunnydale, Grove Park, Knollwood, Glencrest, Seacliff and Greenvale. He finds these names wonderfully restful. They’re a liturgical prayer, a set of moral consolations. A universe structured on such coordinates would have the merits of substance and familiarity. He becomes a little giddy, blinking rapidly, and lets the map slip to the floor.

After a while he takes off his pants. Careful not to disturb the woman, with whom he is not ready to exchange words or looks, he eases onto the bed. Upper body propped by an elbow, he reclines on his side, facing the telephone. Instinct tells him it will shortly ring. He decides to organize his waiting. This will help pull things into a systematic pattern or the illusion of a systematic pattern. Numbers are best for this. He decides to count to one hundred. If the phone doesn’t ring at one hundred, his instinct has deceived him, the pattern has cracked, his waiting has opened out to magnitudes of gray
space. He will pack and leave. One hundred is the outer margin of his passive assent.

When nothing happens, he lowers the count to fifty. At fifty he will get up, get dressed, put his things together and leave. He counts to fifty. When nothing happens, he lowers the count to twenty-five.

There’s a splatter of brightness at one edge of the window. Minutes and inches later, sunlight fills the room. The air is dense with particles. Specks blaze up, a series of energy storms. The angle of light is direct and severe, making the people on the bed appear to us in a special framework, their intrinsic form perceivable apart from the animal glue of physical properties and functions. This is welcome, absolving us of our secret knowledge. The whole room, the motel, is surrendered to this moment of luminous cleansing. Spaces and what they contain no longer account for, mean, serve as examples of, or represent.

The propped figure, for instance, is barely recognizable as male. Shedding capabilities and traits by the second, he can still be described (but quickly) as well-formed, sentient and fair. We know nothing else about him.