to observe him with silent amusement. He made a little shrug and pointed to the man’s feet, indicating that apparently he could walk.
My wife, said the man. His hands outlined an hourglass in the air between them, and as he did this he thought of his wife’s emaciated angular body. He pointed toward the station house. My wife, he said. My wife no walk.
The driver nodded, indicating that he understood. He shrugged a little and toked on his cigarette, as if there were many worse fates than having a lame wife.
You drive us? The man held an imaginary steering wheel with his hands and turned it back and forth. Then he pointed at the driver. You?
The driver did not respond.
I’ll pay you very good, the man said. He removed his wallet from his coat pocket and showed it to the driver.
The driver smiled and reached out his hand.
You’ll drive us to hotel? the man asked.
The driver nodded and tapped his open palm with the fingers of his other hand.
The man opened his wallet and, holding it so that the driver could not see how much cash it contained, took out two bills. He handed one to the driver.
The driver pointed to the second bill.
I get my wife, the man said. Once again he caressed an hourglass and pointed toward the station house. Then he shook the second bill in the air. I give you this at hotel, he said.
The driver nodded.
The man ran across the parking lot. He slipped and fell on the snow-covered steps and cut his chin on the edge of the deck: he saw the red bloom on the snow. He removed his glove and gingerly touched the abrasion. His teeth hurt, and he could feel the warm saline seep of blood in his mouth. He stood up but felt dizzy, so he steadied himself for a moment against the wall. When he felt a bit better he walked carefully around to the back of the station house.
The woman was still sitting on the bench. She was being slowly covered by the snow. It was falling so quickly and thickly that it had already obscured the disruption he had made by dancing on the platform; there was just a ghostly trace of it remaining.
The woman was so still that for a moment the man thought she was dead, but then he saw the fog of her breath tumble from her half-opened mouth. She was sleeping.
He stood for a moment, watching the snow settle upon her, watching her breaths condense and unfurl in the cold air. For a moment he forgot about the taxi waiting in the parking lot, and he forgot about the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel. He forgot their miserable endless journey, and the illness that had left her gaunt and mean. She had rested her head against the wall of the station house, and the lamplight reflected softly off the snow, and like a gentle hand it caressed her face and restored to it a beauty her illness had completely eroded. He forgot everything and for a moment remembered only his love for her, and, by remembering it so keenly, he felt it once again, it flooded him, and he could not contain it, this sudden overwhelming feeling of love, it rose out of him in tears, and he dropped to his knees before her.
The lobby of the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel was dark and seemed cavernous, because its walls could not be discerned in the gloom. They had to cross a vast field of intricately and endlessly patterned carpet in order to arrive at the reception desk, which stood like an altar at the far side of the huge room, opposite the revolving entrance doors. A young woman, wearing an official-looking uniform, stood behind the high wooden counter, on which perched two huge bronze gryphons, each holding a stained-glass iron lantern in its beak. The woman stood rigidly between the two lamps, staring placidly in front of her. She seemed as eerily inanimate as the creatures that flanked her.
It was the final leg of their journey, this trip across the oceanic expanse of lobby. The man and the woman waded through little islands of furniture—club chairs reefed around low circular wooden tables.
It was only when they were standing directly in front of the reception counter that the woman behind it lowered her gaze from the dimness above them all and seemed at last to see the two weary travelers who stood before her.