Shards: A Novel Read Free Page A

money and crimes of passion, alcoholic self-pity and junky visions—all the stuff I’d seen in American movies.
    I tried to lock myself in but couldn’t turn the key. I tried in both directions and it wouldn’t budge. I opened the door, closed it, and tried again. Nothing.
    I looked through the peephole and saw two teenage girls giggling by the Pepsi machine. One of them had a head scarf and looked European; I wondered if she was Bosnian. She covered her mouth when she laughed. The other one looked Arabic but was in a pair of ripped jeans, which exposed her scabby knees. Their faces glowed red and blue, in turn. I’d always been a loner and proud of it—people were something you had to deal with or avoid—but now, standing on a worn patch of beige carpet, on my first night in America, I longed for somebody, anybody.
    Then I felt my stomach turn. Somewhere in all of this, the cheese puke I’d kept down had somehow turned to shit. I ran to the bathroom, and it came out of me in stormy gusts and thunderbolts. When I was done I felt rejuvenated, glorious.
    Still, I didn’t want someone silently slipping in while I was asleep and cutting my throat or, even worse, knocking me out with a chloroform rag, turning me into a hustler rent boy or forcing me to work twenty-four hours a day in an underground meth lab. I didn’t want to wake up with missing kidneys, liver, heart, or eyeballs. I’m in America, I thought, and that meant I was in a movie; the fact that I couldn’t lock the door from the inside was one of those little details upon which terrible plot shifts would depend.
    I was paranoid. I looked through the peephole again—nothing but red, white, and blue lights telling me that I was thirsty. The girls were gone. I opened the door and studied the lock in vain. I dragged over the table and jammed it under the knob. To get in, the crackhead nutter would have to push hard, which would make a noise, which would wake me up, which was my best chance of survival. Now I needed a weapon.
    Someone knocked on the door and my heart kicked against my ribcage like an angry baby. I looked through the peephole: the driver.
    I dragged away the table and opened the door.
    “Indian?” he said, looking over his paper.
    “Indian, yes.”
    He handed me a couple of Styrofoam containers and put a check next to my name.
    “Tomorrow morning at six,” he said, and made as if to go.
    “Uhh . . . ,” I started, and he stopped.
    “What?”
    “My . . . my . . . my key,” I stuttered, “I . . . I can’t . . . uh . . . lock the door on the inside.”
    He looked at me with obvious disdain.
    “It’s automatic. You don’t have to do anything. You close the door and it’s locked.”
    Before I ate, I jammed the table up against the door again, together with the chairs and all my luggage. Fuck the driver, I thought, he might be in on a plan.
    The shower had no faucet, just a knob in the middle of the wall, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it get hot, if there was hot water in this place to begin with. The best I could do was not-icy, and I stepped in for a quick soap and rinse. By the time I was done—two minutes tops—my lips were the color of eggplant.
    Channel 4 was news—fast, indecipherable English I found comforting in the absence of flesh-and-bone humans. I shivered under the covers. I heard the click, click, clicking of women’s shoes outside my window and snuck a peek through the magenta curtains, up through a grate below the street. I saw a woman’s legs and a big man in a mink coat holding both of her wrists and yelling at her. I’m fucking staying up all night, I told myself, but I woke at five thirty to the sound of the alarm, alive and unmolested, all organs intact.
    * * *
    The driver drove us to the airport. The African woman sat behind me this time, so I got to see some of the city. It was mostly New York motorists in profile, sipping from thermos bottles, yelling out of windows, smacking their dashboards,