Via Dolorosa Read Free Page A

this earth twenty-seven years, and what an old-looking face you are.
    The water felt good. Until now, he hadn’t realized he’d been perspiring. It was a small, deeply enclosed bathroom, claustrophobic and damp. The moisture from their morning shower still hung in the air. They’d gotten their clothes sandy and wet yesterday down by the water, and she had hung them across the retractable clothes line over the tub to dry them out. He went to them and felt them now. The clothes were still damp and stiff with sand.
    Back in the room, he was somewhat relieved to find the girl asleep in the big bed. He stood for some time, listening to the unlabored ease of her breathing over the strong rush of the storm, and did not move.

—Chapter II—

    He dressed quietly in the dark, not wanting to wake the girl, and slipped out of the room into the narrow, peach-colored hallway of the hotel. Here, the lighting was poor and there were no windows along the hallway. The wallpaper was undeniably floral in pattern, though faded with age and vaguely nondescript, the way shapes on the horizon may sometimes look to someone suffering from nearsightedness; sections peeled at the corners and rolled up in brittle, curled, cigarette shapes. They were on the sixth floor, six doors down from the stand of elevators, and as he walked to the elevators he counted down the numbers on all the doors silently in his head as they gradually descended.
    Downstairs, the lobby was quiet. Nick walked its length, conscious of the urgent rush of rain against the lobby skylights, and of his footfalls desperate and lonely on the linoleum. It was an old hotel, and the ground-level corridors were not open and spacious and brightly lit but, rather, small and serpentine and hard to find. At times, it was like wandering lost through the subconscious mind of a senile old man. Before a blank wall toward the rear of the lobby, Nick paused and, hands wedged in his pockets, looked up at the rough sketching there done with a series of graphite pencils, completed over the past two weeks. Completed? he thought. Is it really? Colorless, unfulfilled, the sketch was like the ghost of some long-dead reality. It was rough, raw. He stepped back to take it all in. He did not like it, he realized. He’d given it two days to sit, had thought he would like it, or at least would be contentedly pleased with it, but standing here now, he found he did not like it and was not pleased with it at all.
    The sketch was of a quaint summer courtyard, not dissimilar to the hotel’s own courtyard, dense with magnolia blossoms and tropical fronds, abutted by a great sprawling sea and bisected by a winding stone path. There were people, various people, populating the landscape, but their evolution had been temporarily stunted at rough caricatures, their sexes indeterminable, their emotions nonexistent. He had sketched them then discarded them then sketched them again. He had sketched until his sketching hand ached and pained him and became so insubordinate that he could no longer work. Looking at the drawing now, he felt it was too naked to move forward, and he silently wondered when he would feel right—or if he would ever feel right—about moving ahead with the process.
    Process, he thought. See that? It has become a process, some process. There is no art left here. It is mechanical; it is processed.
    He stepped back around to the front of the lobby, suddenly wanting to smoke but knowing for certain it would be unwise to risk stepping outside to do so. Even the sprawling arcade that covered the gravel driveway would afford no protection against the biting wind and strong, driving rain. Still, he wanted a smoke. He’d seen people smoking in the bar, hadn’t he? Yet he couldn’t recall. For a brief moment, he entertained the notion of disabling one of the smoke alarms in the ground-floor bathroom off the lobby, but just the thought of it—and the sense of deviousness and, moreover, self-pity