“Thank you, I’ll just be a minute,” the woman says and she jingles back out of sight behind her seat.
The train begins to move and travels enough that the snow and trees outside the windows are replaced by different snow and different trees before it slows to a stop again.
Zachary takes The Little Stranger out of his bag and starts to read, trying to forget where he is and who he is and what he’s doing for a little while.
The announcement that they have reached Manhattan comes as a surprise, pulling Zachary from his reading.
The other occupants are already gathering their luggage. The girl with the headphones is gone.
“Thank you for this,” the woman in front of him says as he slings his satchel over his shoulder and picks up his duffel bag. She gives him back his pen. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“You’re welcome,” Zachary says, putting the pen back in his bag. He falls into line with the passengers impatiently making their way off the train.
Exiting onto the street from Penn Station is overwhelming and disorienting, but Zachary has always found Manhattan to be disorienting and overwhelming in general. So much energy and people and stuff in such a small footprint. There is less snow here, clumped in gutters in miniature mountains of grey ice.
He reaches Forty-Fourth Street with two hours left before the party. The Algonquin appears quiet but it is difficult to tell from the outside. He nearly misses the entrance to his own hotel across the street and then wanders through a sunken lobby lounge and past a glass-walled fireplace before locating the front desk. He checks in without incident, flinching as he hands over his credit card even though he has more than enough to cover the total from years upon years of large birthday checks sent in lieu of visits from his father. The desk clerk promises to send a clothes steamer up to his room so he can attempt to undo whatever damage his bag has unleashed on his suit.
The windowless upstairs hallways are submarine-like. His room is more mirrored than any hotel room he has ever stayed in before. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors across from the bed and on both walls in the bathroom make the small space seem larger but they also make him feel as though he’s not alone.
The steamer arrives, dropped off by a bellhop who he forgets to tip but it’s too early to prep his suit so Zachary distracts himself with the gigantic round bathtub, even though the mirror-bathtub Zacharys are disturbing. Bathtub opportunities are few and far between. His dorm has a less-than-private row of showers and the claw-foot tub at his mother’s Hudson River Valley farmhouse always looks appealing but refuses to keep water warm for longer than seven minutes at a time. There is, strangely, a single taper candle in the bathroom complete with a box of matches, which is an interesting touch. Zachary lights it and the one flame becomes many within the mirrors.
Somewhere mid-bath he admits to himself that if this excursion proves unsuccessful he will give up on the entire endeavor. Return Sweet Sorrows to the library and try to forget about it and turn his attention back to his thesis. Maybe visit his mom on his way back to school for an aura cleansing and a bottle of wine.
Maybe his story began and ended that day in that alleyway. Maybe his story is about missed opportunities that cannot be recaptured.
He closes his eyes, blocking out the mirror Zacharys.
He sees those two words again in their serifed typeface.
Not yet.
He wonders why he believes it because someone wrote it down in a book. Why he believes anything at all and where to draw mental lines, where to stop suspending his disbelief. Does he believe that the boy in the book is him? Well, yes. Does he believe painted doors on walls can open as though they were real and lead to other places entirely?
He sighs and sinks below the surface, remaining under until he has to return for oxygen-related reasons.
Zachary gets out of the tub before the water has cooled, a decadent bathtub miracle. The fluffy hotel robe makes him think he should stay in fancy hotels more often and then he remembers how much this single night cost him and decides to enjoy it while he can and avoid the minibar.
A muffled ding from his bag signals a text message: a photo from Kat of a half-finished blue-and-bronze-striped