___
Cadence banged her own cell phone with her fist. It was shut down. Dead battery.
After surfacing from the subway stop, she took a wrong turn, walked three needless blocks and finally swept into the lobby of the Algonquin. Heraclitus bolted from his perch. Guests’ heads turned, the desk clerk stood up straight. Cadence made it to the elevator. Her head was ringing like an in-use anvil.
First floor. Out of the elevator. The hallway loomed in two opposite and indistinguishable directions. She had to concentrate, holding her plastic key card and remembering the room number. It was fuzzy, like trying to remember the street address where you lived in the fifth grade. She tried several doors and finally one worked.
She burst through the door and shut it behind her. Safe.
The room was empty. The bed was made. The room was clean and arranged in impeccable order. Her shoe crinkled on a note on the floor. She picked it up, opened it cautiously.
M. Lawrence Novell, the manager, was inquiring whether, as her reservation was through Monday only, would she be extending her stay?
Monday was yesterday, according to the newspapers she glimpsed while running to the subway platform. She held the note like it was heavy. A reminder of an incongruous, alternate world. A place of quiet despair and frozen rivers of indecision, where petty errands sailed haphazardly on the air currents from the seacliff of her inertia. A place that would be a prison where it was always three o’clock in the morning.
She scrunched the note and threw it aside and looked at the room desk. Her cell phone charger cord was there, neatly coiled. She plugged the phone in. She used the hotel phone to call Jess’s room. A stranger answered, indignant about her questions. She called the front desk. Sorry, he checked out. No, no note left behind for her, nothing in Lost and Found. A Mr. Thornton called. “Oh yes, has madame had a chance to do her shopping?” She said a deflated “yes” and hung up and flopped on the bed, crushed.
After a moment, she folded over like a collapsing tower of sticks. She took in the world in sideways view. Maybe that would help her think. Something else is missing! She sat up. She crawled under the bed, stabbing her arms up to the hiding place. She groped. Nothing. The documents, the valise, all of her grandfather’s translations and notes—all gone!
She checked drawers, the closet, inside the shower.
She repeated the entire search, overturned all the trash cans, and ransacked the couch. She grew still and contemplated a return to that perpetual, pre-dawn prison cell that yawed open in her mind.
Just me and my ticket home now.
After a while her room phone rang. “Cadence, Bossier. I’ve been calling your cell and your rooms. I cornered a man, the one who was stalking you. Outside your other room. He got away. I fainted or something. I just blacked out. You were missing …”
“No, I’m OK, more or less. How did you find him?”
“I got a call on Monday from a different cell phone. You were talking with someone … like you were in trouble. I heard a man say he was going to the Algonquin. So I went there and saw this guy outside your grandfather’s room. Then I woke up in the maid’s closet.”
“So, are you sure you’re all right?”
The second line of the phone rang, the light blinking with idiot insistence. “Uh … hold on.” She punched the blinking button. It was the desk clerk again. Sorry, he’d forgotten. There was a note for her from Mr. Grande, formerly of Room 608. She punched back to the first line. “Gotta go. Yes. Yes. I’m OK. Bye.”
Counting the elevator time, she was downstairs in thirty seconds. She got the envelope, Algonquin stationary, her name on the front in Jess’ erratic handwriting. She ripped it open and read the wobbly, trailed writing that spoke of adrenaline and haste:
Cadence only few seconds. I have the docs. Hope we filled in some blanks. Like in that old song, I have to go. So you can stay. I love you. Maybe I’ll get lucky.
Jess
Just like that, everything … gone.
She let the note fall, its wish-wash flutter perfect closure to the yellow telegram flimsy that had ignited this journey. A horde of emotions jostled in her mind, like sale-mad shoppers bottlenecked at the opening doorway of Wal-Mart on Black Friday. All her naïve family questions, Jess, Os, the ancient documents, Elvish, belief, cynicism, Ara—everything, at least whatever was left, was being trampled in this mad, mindless roar. She squeezed her eyes shut and jammed her fists against her mouth to keep in the simultaneous screams of fear and loathing and grief. For just a moment, it felt as if her head was pressuring with explosive gas, a mere spark away from blowing completely apart.
Then it passed. She opened her eyes and let the squeeze-tears fall. Her hands brushed back her hair as she took a deep breath.
She sank into the big lobby chair and just let the world slowly cave in around her. Like some Hollywood Spectacular set, it fell ponderously, pillar by pillar. She accepted the collapse. It would be all right, even the long noir movie that would be her return trip to Los Angeles. Last Train to Mirkwood it might be called.
She left New York City the next morning. Just like she imagined, just like in those old-timey movies, the next four days flickered by in grainy black and white.
The things—the lost documents, the translation notes, the clues—she let them go with each westbound hour, like confetti loosed into the wind. The rest was hard. She mourned for Jess because, somehow, she couldn’t be mad at him. She understood now something of the forces that can sweep people away on journeys that must be taken. Strangely, she grieved also for Ara—her fate twisted to betrayal and her tale so forever lost. Jess was gone but he had left something, a grandchild named Cadence. Ara, even if deservedly so, was erased.
It was only at the other end, as the cab left her off in front of the Mirkwood Forest, the dust settling in motes of slanting, pure California sunshine, that the world returned to full color and Cadence came alive again.
* * *
As she stood there in the dusty sunshine in front of the Forest, its door plastered with a foreclosure notice and “Entry Prohibited: LACSO” yellow tape, Barren stood, six states away to the east, alone in wind-whipped rain. His boots were soaked through. With his baseball cap pulled down to eye level, the rain cascaded down the bill and onto his soaked denim jacket.
Splatters that felt like liquid quarters pelted him. On the pavement they made bonk and splank sounds that threatened golfball-sized hail.
He stood as still as if he were a hunched tree improbably sprouted from the asphalt shoulder.
He smiled. The elements of rain and lightning and thunder were contesting like petty gods, like the caped and marquee-titled wrestlers he had seen on TV. The display came and went in a moment, and the storm raced on. He stood in the lessening drizzle. He had seen the great storms, the ones that included molten fire and flashing light and soul-breaking thunder.
This world was not ready for the making of a new age. That was part of its quaint charm.
The temperatures dropped and a fast-gathering fog emerged as the storm barreled off to the east. A car came by, its slish of tires advancing almost ahead of its headlights. There was a last note of thunder and the fog enshrouded all.
Behind him was a field of corn. The fog poured like a gauzy, grey-white liquid into the rows. The stalks stood there, ghastly yellow and abused, like ranks of lean and tested soldiers ordered for one last review. Some were already faltering, leaning on their comrades.
A few smeared points of light hovered up ahead where the road disappeared. He would walk into the town and decide.