11: No Truth to Tell

Nordarosso was closer to Argintarbo than to Norbus, but the journey to Argintarbo took longer because it required a traveler to change trains twice. Jon sat on a bench at the station in Brulajtarbo, waiting for the connecting train, and he tried to remember if he had been to that station before. He felt that he had not. He felt that the last time he had made this trip the route had not passed through Brulajtarbo. But he could not be sure; his memories were muddled and dreamlike. He could not even guess how many times in his own subjective past he had experienced this trip, but he wished he knew how many times he had really done it. He ought to know that. Anna would know…

He looked around the platform at the other waiting passengers. A cold autumn drizzle had driven everyone under the shelter of the platform’s tin roof.

A man sitting on a nearby bench had a notebook open in his lap, writing with a ballpoint pen. Jon could not see what he wrote, but his strokes were quick and precise. He was accustomed to writing without a desk. A journalist, perhaps? A novelist? This man knew what he was creating, and had a plan to complete it. A vision of finished work drew him into the future.

Near the writer, a woman sat on the floor with a small girl, her daughter, presumably. She had spread out a dozen wooden tiles between them, with which they were playing a matching game. This woman would remember the girl’s first word, her first step, the first time she had matched a tile correctly. A history of glad responsibility anchored her in the past.

These people were unreal, hypothetical: they would not become real until Jon made them so. But in another way they were more real than he was. They were shaped by this world, anticipated it, valued it, loved it (or perhaps hated). They had hopes, joys, fears, scars. They told stories, and stories were told about them.

Jon stood and walked over to a white-haired man who was leaning against the side of a ticket booth. The man wore a threadbare cloak. A battered suitcase sat at his feet.

“Excuse me,” Jon said. “I’m traveling from Mezunko to Argintarbo. Are you familiar with that route?”

“I’ve been through Mezunko a few times,” the man said. “Why do you ask?”

“Can you tell me, has the route changed? I don’t remember stopping at this station the last time I made this trip.”

“Changed since when? I remember when there was no route. It used to be the only way to get from here to Argintarbo was to take a wagon to Morborda, on the coast, then wait there and hope a ship showed up.”

“You remember this area before the railroad? Are you from Brulajtarbo, then?”

“No. I’m from Pastejorosso. That’s the village that used to be here. They crushed it flat and built Brulajtarbo on top. We. We crushed it flat. At the time, you could make more money tearing down a village then working in one. I made a lot of money that year.” The man’s face clouded, and he looked away.

Jon went back to his bench, his question forgotten. He envied the old man from Pastejorosso. The man had come from somewhere. He had lost something. He was part of a story. Jon had no story. He had never had anything to lose.

* * *

Jon’s train approached Argintarbo from the south. The tracks leading to the Imperial City diverged from those leading to the Industrial District before the District was even visible, but Jon still had a good view of it through the carriage’s right side windows. It looked very different from when he had lived in Jaboro’s corporate orphanage. The factories then had been only parts of wide campuses. There had been lawns with trees between the boxy gray buildings. Now the buildings were dense and tall, and there was nothing green. At this distance the factories seemed to touch and merge, as if the District were a sooty concrete mountain. The sun was high, but fumes of black, gray, and brown from hundreds of smokestacks maintained a smothering twilight.

This smoke blew east, away from the Imperial City, and by the time the train reached the station the smoke was no longer visible.

The City was exactly as Jon remembered it. The station was just north of the Park, and he was treated to a gorgeous view as he walked down its steps: stately buildings of greenish marble before him, a blaze of orange and red trees to his right, the high white walls of the Palace rising above the City on his left. Men and women in flowing silk shaded themselves with bright parasols.

Jon collected his trunk from a porter (tipping a whole silver gil), and began walking toward the Park. Although anyone could visit the Imperial City, only Imperial officials were allowed to dwell there. Jon did not have an Imperial token, so he could not rent a room north of the Park, at any price. There were several luxurious hotels just south of the Park that catered to wealthy visitors with business in the City. The most luxurious of these was the Albrook. Jon had stayed there before, and it was his destination now.

He had no real plan of what to do next. Vivdauro had a large headquarters in the Merchant District, and he believed that information about Beatrace — if not the woman herself — was inside. He would go to the Albrook, sleep, set a net early in the morning on the next day, and then…

Again, the old problem: he was in Argintarbo to find Beatrace en Cynd, but nothing obligated him to actually do that. He could do whatever he wanted, without limit, without penalty. To any other man, this would seem like a wonderful freedom. It had seemed like a wonderful freedom to him at first, nine years ago, ninety years ago. Now it pressed on him like a yoke.

Introspection is the road to madness. Focus on the case.

He summoned to mind the message that Vivdauro had used to recall Beatrace, their agent: “Larisa de Lulia, inheritance insecure with current strategy. Aware of special talents. Meet to discuss.” It was code, obviously, but Jon had no guess as to what it might mean. He had already turned the clue over in his mind for hours and gained no insight. He expected no insight now. But it was something to focus on.

Jon was not in a hurry, and the trunk, despite built-in wheels, was heavy. He walked slowly, taking in the sights with deliberate concentration — east along the Park’s north edge, south through the Park on a mossy sunken path, east again — so that the sun was westering by the time he reached the Albrook.

The Technological Revolution was only subtly evident in the rich northern part of the Merchant District. Power lines were buried under the street, or concealed in terracotta tubes that ran up the sides of buildings and along curbs. Air handlers chugged on rooftops, and automobiles banged in the distance, but such sources of mechanical noise were kept out of sight, and the streets looked much as they might have 300 years ago. Plaques reading “Horace” and “Euhorn” flaunted this historicity.

The Albrook stood in the epicenter of this richness, anchoring and defining it. An imposing building of light brick and dark timber, it stood six stories tall with a clock tower half again its height, looming judgmentally over its innumerate neighbors. A large plaque on the foundation read “Horace 488”: the year it had been built and the Emperor who had been reigning.

The Albrook had a restaurant on the ground floor whose seating spilled out onto the street during fine weather. Jon felt that the air was too cool for outdoor dining, but a score of tables had nonetheless been set up around the restaurant’s exterior entrance, near the building’s southwest corner. They must be expecting a supper crowd, Jon thought. That crowd had not yet gathered, and only a few of the tables were occupied. As Jon approached the main entrance, he glanced over at the tables, and he noticed a young woman looking directly at him. She was sitting alone, with a book and a cup of tea before her. She was extremely plain, wearing an ill-fitting tan kimono, with dirty blonde hair that nearly matched it. Spectacles partially obscured her eyes.

A porter approached Jon and offered to carry his trunk up the steps leading to the main entrance. He accepted. Another porter opened the doors for him. As he entered, he glanced toward the tables again. The woman was still looking at him.

Anna had wired the hotel to make a reservation, and wired a local bank to deliver payment, so Jon merely needed to present himself at the front desk to get his room key. The desk clerk, a skinny young man who looked palid in his black uniform, perked up when he heard Jon’s name.

“Johannes de Alder,” the clerk asked, “the detective?”

“Yes!” Jon said, grinning. Then he put his finger to his lips in a quieting gesture.

“Of course!” the clerk said, nodding seriously. “Here is the key to your suite, Mr. Alder. It’s on the sixth floor, at the southwest corner. Would you like your luggage brought up now?”

“Yes. I want to get settled before supper. Speaking of which, can you make me a reservation at the restaurant for six o’clock? An inside table.”

“Certainly, Mr. Alder.”

Jon took the key and turned toward the elevators. The bespectacled woman was blocking his way. Not aggressively, but she had positioned herself so that he could not avoid seeing her, and he would need to curve his path around her to reach the elevators. He met her gaze, and his attention seemed to startle her. She looked down at her hands, which clutched a book.

“Can I help you?” Jon asked.

“Oh!” the woman squeaked. “I just, um, I thought I recognized you. You’re not… Are you…”

Jon noticed the title of her book: Five Great Cases of Johannes de Alder, by Frida en Kalland. He frowned.

“Are you Johannes de Alder?” the woman blurted, words tumbling. She dropped her gaze again, glasses slipping down her nose.

Jon regarded the woman with surprise that quickly turned to irritation. He expected and desired his name to be recognized, but for random people to know his face was a problem. How did she recognize him? He was fairly certain that he had never been photographed, but any number of people could have drawn him from memory. Was there a picture of him in that book? He was on the verge of asking her, but if he confirmed his identity, then she might tell her friends, or try to follow him. She could be a nuisance.

“No,” he said coldly, “I am not.”

He gestured to the porter to bring his trunk, then moved toward the elevators, brushing the woman aside. He did not look back to see her reaction.

As with all pre-Revolution buildings, the Albrook’s elevators were not incorporated into the structure, but attached to the outside. A uniformed operator slid open a door in what had once been an exterior wall and ushered passengers into an elevator carriage of glossy wood and velvet. On the sixth floor, Jon and the porter got out, then walked the length of the building to his suite. Jon tipped the porter and entered it, pulling his trunk behind.

The first thing to be done when occupying a new space was to check for prohibition wards. The law only required wards to be placed at the entrances of buildings, and there was no reason for one to be hidden in a hotel suite, but being surprised by a ward would be a terrible inconvenience, and checking was not hard.

Jon unlocked his trunk and lifted out the smaller chest that contained his dams. He opened the chest, took out the big cuboid dam, and turned the knob on its face. Inside, chaotic potential began building.

Jon opened a desk drawer and took out a piece of hotel stationary, a pen, and a letter opener. He placed the paper flat on the desktop. He twisted the pen until it unscrewed and came apart, exposing the porcelain ink cartridge. He set this on the paper and smashed it with the letter opener. It cracked, spraying drops of ink. Before the ink could begin to pool, he picked up the broken cartridge and waved it back and forth over the paper, letting drops splash randomly. When the paper was densely spattered, he placed it on top of the dam.

If there were a prohibition ward nearby, its influence would cause the dam to discharge randomly after it had accumulated a certain amount of kao. When a magician used a dam, the power of his magic was limited by four variables: the amount of kao available, the proximity in time and space of his intended effect, the probability of that effect happening without magic, and the specificity of his intention. Random discharges were not limited by the fourth variable, and so they were inherently dangerous. Because there was no intention dictating the effect, in theory a random discharge could do anything. In theory, a random discharge could cause the entire universe to vanish, or to be filled with pudding. But the first three variables still applied, and so the effect of a random discharge could, to a degree, be predicted, and the smaller the values of those variables, the more precise the prediction could be.

By covering the paper with random ink blots and placing it on the dam, Jon had arranged an effect that would require minimal kao, was minimally distant in time and space, and was highly likely to occur. If the dam discharged randomly, at a low charge, with the paper touching it, the effect would almost certainly be the ink blots changing to a different random pattern. Thus the paper and dam formed a prohibition ward detector.

Jon picked up the detector and walked around the suite with it, from the entryway, through the lounge, the kitchenette, the bedroom, bathroom, and out onto the balcony. The ink pattern did not change. He set the detector down on the table in the lounge, at the approximate center of the suite.

It was five o’clock. He went about unpacking the rest of his things. This took very little time, and when he glanced up at the clock on the bedroom wall, it was only five fifteen.

How did that woman recognize me? Jon thought. If people knew his face, he might have to start wearing disguises everywhere he went. That would be extremely annoying…

At five thirty, Jon went back to the lounge and looked at his detector. By now more than enough kao should have built up to trigger a ward, if there was one. The ink had not changed. Satisfied, Jon went to the bedroom closet where he had put the other dams. He activated each of them. By the morning, they would all hold significant kao, and he could use whichever he chose.

* * *

Jon ate, and then wandered the streets looking for a bookstore that was still open. He found one and bought a copy of every book about himself, watching to see if the clerk would recognize him. She did not, and there was no picture of him in any of the books. Indeed, there was little in the books that could be used to identify him: aside from correctly stating his place of residence and that he was of lean build, all personal details were fiction.

But what personal details were there to give? As far as any biographer would be able to discover, Johannes de Alder had simply appeared, inexplicably connected to all of the resources he would need to create a base in Nordarosso, and connected to nothing else. There was no truth to tell.

He spent the rest of the evening in his suite, thumbing with waning interest through fictionalized accounts of his fictionalized life, then went to bed.

* * *

Almost all of the Argintarbo-based corporations had their headquarters in the Industrial District, and almost all of them were attached to a factory. Vivdauro headquarters was unusual on both counts: it was in the northeast corner of the Merchant District, almost on the edge of the city, and Vivdauro had no factory. This far east, the streets of the Imperial City had ended, and the Park had faded out into a weedy meadow. The Vivdauro campus was directly south of this meadow, so there were no large buildings or paved roads between it and the sea, about a mile to the north.

The headquarters building was enormous. Jon had seen factories and warehouses that were larger, but never a building that was intended solely for human occupancy. It was perfectly circular and was perhaps half a mile in circumference. Four tiers of increasingly smaller circles rose above this, giving the building a conical shape. Its outer surface was all metal and glass, which might have been impressive, but the metal was painted a dull gray, and the windows were narrow strips that reflected only disconnected scraps of their surroundings.

Jon had decided to walk there from the Albrook, to get a feel for the neighborhood. He had spent about an hour moving past Bosfus-era buildings of mostly red brick and mostly white wood, with wide, cheerful windows, and colorfully painted gables. Then he turned a corner, and there was the ugliest building he had ever seen. He stopped and squinted at it, not quite believing his eyes. Approached from the south, with nothing but empty scrubland and the distant sea behind it, Vivdauro headquarters looked like a huge termite mound, or a recently extinct volcano. Its ugliness seemed deliberate, as if the architect had intended to discourage anyone from looking at it.

A concrete path led from the cobbled street to a bank of disproportionately small exterior doors in the building’s south side. Above these was a disproportionately small sign that read simply “Vivdauro.” There was no perimeter fence or other visible security.

Jon walked down the path and chose a door at random, casually disabling the prohibition ward mounted above it as he approached. He entered.

He was surprised to find himself not in a broad lobby, but in a small antechamber. The exterior doors did not all lead into the same space. Each door must open into a room like this one, which was a… Jon had never seen a room like this.

The room was brightly lit — uncomfortably bright — by rows of electric lights recessed into the concrete ceiling. A fence of iron bars divided the room into halves. There was a gap in the bars large enough for a man to walk through, but no gate or door that could close it. There were no furniture or decorations on Jon’s side, and no windows or doors other than the door he had come through. A large “8” was painted on the floor.

On the far side of the bars were two small desks, one of either side of the gap, at which sat two pudgy men in blue tunics. Jon assumed that they were guards, although they did not seem either formidable or vigilant. One of them was reading a newspaper, and the other was building a little house out of paperclips. There was a white door in the center of the wall beyond them. That must lead deeper into the building. Two gray doors were set into the walls on either side. These presumably connected to antechambers seven and nine.

The guard with the newspaper looked up at Jon but said nothing. The look was not challenging: Jon had the impression that if he stood there quietly, the guard would go back to his reading.

“Hello!” Jon said. His greeting was not returned. “Is this the main entrance?”

“This is an employee entrance,” the guard replied, seeming perplexed that anyone would ask such a stupid question.

“Ah! Is there a visitor entrance?”

“No.”

“So… if someone who is not an employee needs to get into the building… where do they… do that?”

“They don’t.”

“No one except employees ever comes in?”

“No.”

“What about deliveries? Mail? Visiting clients? Relatives of the owner?”

“If you have a delivery, just drop it on the floor there.”

“Are you telling me there is no way at all for anyone to get into this building except by becoming an employee?”

“If you want to apply for a job, you have to do it by mail.”

Jon closed his eyes. He imagined himself shooting the guard in the head. In his mind’s eye, he turned to the remaining guard, smirked, and said, “Look, a job just opened up!”

“Well, maybe you can answer some questions for me,” Jon said, blinking away his reverie. “Have you ever seen the woman in this photograph?”

Jon moved up to the iron bars and held out the photograph of Beatrace in her wedding dress. The guard squinted at it, but he did not move closer to look. Frustrated, Jon turned and walked through the gap in the bars, intending to slam the photo down on the guard’s desk. But as he passed through the gap, the lights above him suddenly turned red. A bell chimed shrilly. Half a dozen steel bars shot out of the frame of the white door, barring it with a loud clang.

Jon reflexively leapt backward, one hand reaching for the dam concealed in his sash and the other for the automatic holstered beneath his robe. He landed in a crouch, on the entry side of the bars. As suddenly as the lights had changed to red, they became white again. The chiming stopped. The bars over the white door slowly withdrew into the wall.

“This is an employee entrance!” the guard shouted at him. “You can’t come in!”

Both of the guards were glaring at him, but they had not drawn weapons or even stood up. Jon slowly rose from his crouch and straightened his robes.

“How does that work?” he asked. “How did the… building… know that I’d gone on that side of the bars?”

“You have to have an employee key,” the guard said. He reached into his uwagi and withdrew a shiny metal card on a thin chain. He waved it at Jon.

“What if I took your key?” Jon asked. “Could I get in then?” He reached again for his gun.

“No,” the guard scoffed. “This is my key.”

Jon’s hand had already closed around the grip of his automatic, but he checked himself. The guard was surely correct: if the security system could be subverted simply by taking a key from one of these morons, then it was useless. A determined intruder would simply kill the guards and walk through, as he was about to do. There must be more to it.

“Your key only works for you?” Jon asked.

“Of course it only works for me. It’s my key.”

Jon stared at the floor, frustrated. There seemed to be nothing he could accomplish here. When he looked up, he was astonished to see that the guards had returned their attention to the paperclips and the newspaper.

“Have you seen the woman in this photograph?” Jon demanded, again approaching the bars. This time instead of holding up the photo he flicked it with his fingers, so that it sailed between the bars and landed on the guard’s desk. The guard picked it up and looked at it, squinting and turning it various directions, as if trying to decide which way was up.

“No,” he said finally. “I’ve never seen her.”

“Is she pretty?” the other guard asked, speaking for the first time. “Let me see.” He stood up from his desk and waddled over to look. He saw the photo and frowned with disappointment.

Jon opened his mouth to ask for the photo back, but then closed it again. He sighed and walked out.

* * *

Jon spent the next hour walking in circles around Vivdauro headquarters, looking for another way in. There was none. The building’s entire circumference was flat, colorless metal interrupted at regular intervals by narrow, dark windows, each section the same as the last. The only irregularities were the entrance doors: ten of them, all identical.

After circling the building twice, Jon started trying the doors, entering each in turn (skipping eight). Except for the numbers on the floors and the faces of the apathetic guards, each of the ten antechambers was identical. The guards’ apathy was baffling: Jon’s behavior could not be more suspicious, but the men charged with securing the building seemed completely uninterested in him. Perhaps they didn’t need to be: perhaps the security system was so strong that vigilance was unnecessary. But if that were the case, then why were the guards there at all? And why were there ten entrances? Why would Vivdauro pay twenty guards and then split them up so that there were effectively only two? Nothing about the building made sense.

To the south, across the street, was a little square surrounded by little cafes. Tired and annoyed, Jon walked to one of these and bought a cinnamon bun and tea. He watched the headquarters through the cafe window, the cheerful frame making the building look even more ugly and weird by contrast. He saw several people enter and leave: employees with keys, presumably.

“How many people work there?” Jon shouted toward the kitchen door.

The proprietor emerged from the kitchen, wiping flour off his hands with a rag. “I never counted,” he said, shrugging. “A lot. Thousands.”

“What do they all do?”

“Make good money.”

“Are most of your customers Vivdauro employees?”

The proprietor nodded. “This place is packed three times a day,” he said, gesturing to the twenty empty tables that surrounded Jon. “There’s only one shift at Vivdauro.”

“But you don’t overhear them talk about their work?”

The man shrugged.

Jon felt his watch. It was nearly noon. If the cafe was full at lunch, then customers would be arriving shortly.

Jon slapped a silver coin down on the table. “I’m going to sit here through lunchtime,” he said. “Keep bringing me tea.”

At exactly noon, Vivdauro’s ten doors began disgorging employees like the gills of a mushroom shedding spores. At first Jon thought that all of them were men, but as they came closer he saw that this was because the men and women were dressed nearly identically. All of them wore brown or gray uwagis with brown or gray trousers. Many of them carried bags or wore hats, but these were all of similarly drab colors.

As they left the Vivdauro property and entered the street, they dispersed in all directions, many going to the cafes and shops that lined the square, but most going further, into the streets beyond. The cafe Jon was in filled almost immediately. Four waitresses emerged from the kitchen area to take orders.

Jon took out a small copy of Proverbs of Divine Emperor Adolfos and pretended to contemplate it while he strained to eavesdrop on the tables nearest him. He was disappointed. A pair of women to his left were having an intense debate about whether or not one of their coworkers was planning to propose marriage to another. Two men on his right debated the probable outcome of a boxing match with equal intensity. Behind him a table of four discussed a recent fire in the slums. No one said anything about their work.

One of the employees, a bald man with a thin beard, walked up to Jon’s table, the only table in the cafe with an empty seat.

“Are you saving that for someone?” the man asked, gesturing at the empty chair.

“No. Please sit,” Jon answered. The man sat, and a waitress hurried over to him. He ordered noodle soup. Jon closed his book, but the man ignored him and stared out the window.

“Is that a uniform?” Jon asked, loudly to be heard over the background noise.

“Huh?” the man grunted. Jon gestured to his gray uwagi. “No,” the man said. “This is just… uh… the style.”

“How long have you worked for Vivdauro?”

“Long enough.”

“Do you like it?”

The man seemed offended by this question. “Of course I like it!” He returned his gaze to the window, frowning. Jon said no more. A minute later he opened his book again.

Jon watched furtively while the man ate his soup. When he bent his head down over his bowl, Jon caught a glimpse of a thin chain around his neck. It was just like the one the guard’s employee key had been attached to. An idea suddenly occurred to Jon. He touched the spheroid dam concealed in his sash and waited for the man to swallow.

The man suddenly doubled over, choking silently, his airway blocked by an unchewed noodle. Jon pretended not to notice until the man started pounding on the table.

“Are you alright?” Jon shouted. “I think this man is choking!” The room went quiet as all eyes turned to Jon’s table. The man pawed at his throat, eyes pleading. Several people rose to their feet and moved toward him.

Jon waited as people surrounded the table, some reaching to help, most only gawking. Someone stood the choking man up and began pounding on his back while someone else supported him under the armpits. When the crowd had become dense, Jon stood. “I know what to do!” he shouted. He moved around the table and roughly shoved several people aside to get behind the choking man.

He put his left hand on the man’s throat and performed some quick massaging motions, as if he were pulling something up out of his lungs. While he did this, his right hand touched his dam. The noodle vanished from the man’s windpipe and appeared in his mouth. He staggered forward and spat it out, gasping for air. Jon jumped backward. “Give him room!” he shouted.

With attention focussed on the bald man’s gasping, and vision obscured by the press of bodies, no one noticed that Jon had taken his employee key. They would notice soon, but Jon only needed the key for a few minutes.

Jon elbowed his way to the door and slipped out of the cafe. He jogged across the street and up the path to Vivdauro headquarters, where he entered door number two. The guards looked up, surprised at someone coming in while it was still lunchtime. Jon waved the stolen key. “I think one of your employees dropped this,” he said. “I’ll just leave it here with you.” He strode through the gap in the iron bars, holding the key out in front of him.

The lights turned red. The bell chimed, and the bars slammed into place over the white door. Jon pretended to be surprised, staring up at the lights as though transfixed.

“Give me that!” one of the guards yelled. He snatched the key from Jon. As Jon’s hand released the stolen key, his other hand flashed out and latched onto the guard’s key. Jon jerked it, snapping its chain. He stepped back onto the outer side of the bars, holding the guard’s key, while the guard, still standing on the inner side, clutched the key belonging to the bald man.

The alarm continued to ring.

Jon threw the guard’s key, arcing it over his head so that it banged against the far wall and clattered to the floor near the white door.

The alarm stopped.

“How dare you–” the guard began. But Jon had already left.

* * *

Jon returned to the Albrook feeling intensely curious. His first day investigating Vivdauro had left him with dozens of questions, half of which were completely unexpected. He felt like he knew less, not more, than when he had set out that morning. It was ellating.

He dined in the hotel restaurant, only vaguely aware that the meal was excellent. His mind raced. He had to get inside Vivdauro headquarters, but how? His experiment had confirmed that the building would lock itself against anyone who was not an employee bearing a personalized key. And how did it do that? Jon had never heard of any technology that could recognize a person, much less associate a person with an object…

Vivdauro was such a mystery that he had almost forgotten about Beatrace. Why was the building so large? Why were the employees so strange? How did its security system work? Many days of investigation to discover secrets that were actually interesting: this was a perfect case.

He decided that the next day he would simply shoot out one of the building’s windows, go in, and see what he could see. Thus resolved, he returned to his suite, ordered a bottle of eighty-year-old whiskey from room service, and drank half of it.

He had not intended to drink so much, but the liquor was delicious, and he was feeling indulgent. He stood on the suite’s balcony, watching people pass on the brightly lit street, watching people go in and out of the restaurant entrance, directly below him. He took sip after nutty sip straight from the bottle, until he could not see the people anymore, but only moving blurs, like little fish below the surface of a pond. He stumbled back into the lounge and slumped on the couch in a haze of vague satisfaction. Just as his consciousness was fading, he realized with panic that he needed to pee. Steadying himself on furniture and walls, he slowly made his way to the bathroom and seated himself on the toilet, feeling enormous accomplishment that he had managed this feat. (He was really a very accomplished person, he thought; he needed to give himself more credit, more grace.)

Jon fell asleep on the floor, his feet in the bathroom, his head in the lounge.

He was startled awake by a feeling of constriction. Something was pressing on his chest, on his whole body, like someone had shoveled sand on top of him. He could not move. Across the suite, he heard the click and creak of a door slowly opening.