Asimov's SF, September 2009 Read online

  Suddenly he grins. He throws one of the halves into the sky. It hangs there, swaying back and forth, and then slowly comes to a stop.

  The woman on the cycle looks at him. Then she sees me beyond him, and our eyes meet. Someone—I think it's Ebenezer—comes toward me and closes the door.

  I stand in the darkness of the hallway, feeling lost, left out. I want more than anything to open the door, to watch the show, see what they're going to do next. At the same time, of course, I know there's no way I can. This is another one of my parents’ hard and fast rules—never bother the guests.

  I go back to bed. I can still hear the music, very faint, and I think I'm never going to get to sleep. Then, to my surprise, I'm waking up and it's already morning. The sun's coming through the window, and I hear the hum of the freeway. In the clear light of day what I saw last night seems impossible, a dream, and the more I think about it the more I'm sure that that's what it was.

  Still, I check on Ebenezer's room after breakfast, even though it's not on the list of rooms I have to clean that morning. The “Please clean room” sign is out, and my heart pounds as I knock on the door and then turn the key in the lock, wondering what I'll find.

  It's just a normal room, though—two beds, a chest of drawers, a television set. I look up, feeling silly, but of course there's nothing there but the ceiling, with the stain that looks like Africa that my mom's always trying to get my dad to paint over. The only thing that's unusual—if you can even call it that—is the suitcase on the luggage rack. It's brown leather, cracked and creased all over like it's been handled for a hundred years, and stuffed to the point where the straps around it are stretched tight.

  We're never, ever supposed to look in our guests’ things. I sigh and strip the beds, then bring in clean linen. As I make the beds I wonder for the first time which of them is sleeping where. Is Ebenezer with the woman in pink, or the one in the marching costume? Or is he sleeping with one of the men, platonically or otherwise?

  I'm blushing now, I'm hot as a radiator. Sometimes my parents try to guess what's going on in one of the rooms, but never when they think I'm listening, or Bert either, when he lived here. We're not supposed to wonder about it—we're supposed to mind our own business. I've certainly seen my share of strange things lying around in the rooms, massage oil and handcuffs and things shaped like penises, but if you listen to my parents no one ever has sex here. (For the record, I haven't seen an actual penis yet, but I'm pretty sure I know what they look like.)

  The room's so clean it takes only a few minutes to finish. I glance around, reluctant to leave, and I realize I haven't seen the unicycle anywhere. I look in the closet, but it's empty. I look at the brown suitcase again. I go over to it, and before I can think about what I'm doing I unbuckle the straps and tug on the huge clasp keeping it closed.

  It springs open, almost like there's someone trapped inside. Things pour out and clatter to the floor—a trumpet, a candlestick, a mask made out of feathers, a horn from an ancient phonograph. The unicycle comes next—but it couldn't possibly have fit in there, it's far too big. There's a huge crash as it falls, and I freeze, panicked, waiting for one of them to storm into the room and demand to know what I'm doing there.

  I force myself to get moving. My heart's beating so loudly I can barely hear anything beyond it. I start putting things back into the suitcase, but there seems to be even more stuff on the floor now—a framed black-and-white photograph of an elephant, an old-fashioned bicycle horn with a rubber bulb, a couple of wigs, a scatter of beads, gold and purple and stoplight red.

  Everything's telling me to hurry, but for some reason I stop and look at the picture of the elephant. It's being led along a beach by two people in bathing costumes from at least a century ago, the man in long trunks and a T-shirt, the woman in a skirt and sleeveless top. I look closer and see that it's Ebenezer and the woman with the feather boa. On the back it says, “Ebenezer Monologue and Sophronia Prerogative, 1908.”

  I don't have time to think about this, though. I shove everything I can inside the suitcase, but I have to leave some stuff on top and the unicycle propped up against the luggage rack.

  I move on to the room next door, but there's nothing unusual here, not even any luggage. As I go through all my familiar chores I start to calm down, and by afternoon I'm feeling excited again, expectant, waiting for night and another dream, if that's what it was. I even wonder if they left that suitcase there for me to find, if they wanted me to open it.

  At dinner my father asks me about the loud crash he heard that morning. “You better not have dropped another lamp,” my father says. “It's coming out of your allowance if you did.”

  The lamp is also something I did last year, but my parents never forget anything I did wrong. “Don't worry, I didn't break anything,” I say.

  I think he's going to say something else, but he just shakes his head and stares off into space. My mother seems less talkative too, and I start to feel relief—they don't know about the suitcase, Ebenezer didn't say anything to them. We sit there eating, each in our own worlds. It's so quiet I hear the rush of the freeway, like running water, and over that, in my own mind, the music I heard in Ebenezer's room.

  I don't think I'm going to sleep at all that night, but once again I wake up to faint music. I get out of bed and go down the hall. To my great delight Ebenezer's door is open, and I go toward it as quietly as I can and peer inside.

  The woman—Sophronia—is on the unicycle again, pedaling back and forth. This time she's juggling pure white points of light, sharp as crystal—stars, I think, taken from the sky the same way she took the moon. She throws one high in the air while the others keep circling, then another, and another—and then suddenly she misses one and it streaks for the ground like a comet.

  A clown runs out and grabs it before it hits the floor. She leaves the other lights in mid-air and goes after the clown, chasing him on the cycle as he scuttles back and forth. Just as she reaches him he throws the star to another clown across the room. She starts toward the second clown—but he's already tossed the star to the first. The clowns go back and forth for a while, playing catch with the star, Sophronia racing between them.

  Finally she stops in the center, pedaling a little on her cycle, and studies the two of them. Then she turns and heads toward the second clown, and reaches him just as he catches the star. He looks cornered, unable to throw the star with her blocking his path—and then suddenly he opens his mouth and swallows it.

  Sophronia looks horrified. So does the first clown, and so do the fat man and the thin man, who come on stage and head with the other two toward the clown who swallowed the star. The second clown shakes his head frantically. He opens his mouth to say something, and silver light pours out.

  The thin man waves his hand, and pulls a sword out of the air. He advances toward the clown, and with one quick motion he chops off the clown's head.

  I gasp loudly. Everyone turns to look at me. The door closes again—but this time I can't bear it, I pound on the door and shout at them. I don't even know what I'm saying; it's something like, “Let me see, oh please, let me see!” over and over.

  The door opens a crack. The clown—the dead clown, the man whose head was chopped off—peers out at me. It's not a man at all, I see, but the woman who wore the marching uniform. “Who is it?” someone inside the room says.

  The fat man comes to stand behind her, so huge he looks like a backdrop for the clown. Now he's wearing a vast flannel shirt and a nightcap, like an ad for a chain of motels I saw once. He yawns. “What is it?” he says. “We're trying to sleep in here.”

  “I wanted—I just wanted to see the rest of it,” I say lamely.

  He squints at me. “Your parents own this hotel, is that right? What do you think they'd say if they heard you were waking up their guests in the middle of the night?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes, well, sorry.” He slams the door.

  I think about knocking agai
n, but then I imagine what my parents would say if any of them told on me. I go back to my room and try to sleep, but I'm too excited, my mind's too busy with everything I saw. The clown came alive again, I think. Alive. In the middle of the night, halfway dreaming, it seems vastly important, a cause for celebration.

  * * * *

  I clean Ebenezer's room first the next day. The suitcase is closed again, stuffed tight. I don't dare to open it, but I do peek in the closet and all the drawers. There's nothing there, no clothes at all. Do they wear the same thing from day to day, Ebenezer in his fancy suit and Sophronia in her pink dress? And where are the clown costumes?

  I wander around the hotel for a while, looking for the troupe. I lose track of time and end up not getting to some of my chores, and my mother checks some guests into a room I haven't cleaned yet. I have to stand there and listen to her yell at me, but fortunately she finishes quicker than I expected, and at the end she just tells me to get back to work.

  I go back to Ebenezer's room instead. I've checked the room twice already, but this time when I open the door the troupe is sitting along the two beds, talking quietly to each other. “Hello,” I say, trying frantically to think of a reason for being in their room. “Do you need anything?”

  “Is it the policy of this hotel to look in on their guests’ private meetings?” someone says. It's the thin man; he's up near the headboard, almost hidden by the fat man next to him.

  “Sorry. I'm sorry.” No one moves to close the door, though, so I start talking, not even sure what I'm saying, just trying to get everything out as fast as I can. “I saw you the last few nights, the unicycle and the clowns and everything, and it was the most wonderful thing I've ever seen in my life, and—and if you need someone to work for you, to—to carry your suitcases or clean up or anything, well, I'll do it, you don't even have to pay me, just let me go with you...”

  I run out of breath. “Ah, another one,” Ebenezer says.

  “Another one what?” I say.

  “Another one who wants to run away with us.”

  “Yeah, but—but I'm a hard worker, I work here all the time. Please—you have to let me go with you. I'll go crazy if I stay here, doing the same thing over and over.” I've never thought any of this; up until a few minutes ago, in fact, I would have said I liked working at the hotel.

  “Good. We're crazy too.”

  “There, see?” I smile. He's going to come around, I really think he is. “We have something in common.”

  “But if you're crazy here ... and you leave the hotel ... well, you'd be sane then, wouldn't you? And we wouldn't have that in common anymore.”

  I can't say anything for a moment, trying to work my way around this, realizing how cleverly he's boxed me in. “Well, then I'd be crazy like you,” I say lamely.

  “I don't know. Are there different kinds of craziness?”

  The mouse sticks his head out of Ebenezer's pocket. “I don't think so, boss,” he says.

  “Oh, come on,” I say. “What does a mouse know about—about sanity?”

  “Who would you ask?” Ebenezer says.

  I feel like I've gotten lost in this conversation. I try to get back to my original argument. “Look—I can clean for you, do anything you want. I've worked hard all my life. Ask—” Who should they ask? My parents? They'd kill me if they knew I wanted to leave.

  “Ask your mother, yes,” Ebenezer says, just as if I'd said it out loud. “It's your mother I was thinking of earlier, when I said you were another one. She made the same request of us, ten years ago. And ten years before that, too.”

  I feel as if someone has just hit me, knocked all the air out of my lungs. My mother? The same woman who's always talking about responsibility, how important it is to keep the hotel going?

  Ten years ago I was five. Five years old, and she'd wanted to run out on me, leave me and my father and Bert and the hotel...

  I'm standing there staring at them, my mouth open. I try to concentrate. “Think about it, okay?” I can't trust myself to say any more, and I turn to go.

  “It's a thought,” Ebenezer says.

  I catch my breath. What has he just said? I turn back. “Fantastic,” I say.

  He's right behind me, though the last time I saw him he was sitting on the bed. He's smiling, like he's about to give me a present. I grin back at him, even though I know he's going to close the door on me. It doesn't matter. He said he'd think about it—that's all that's important.

  * * * *

  I go through the rest of my chores in a daze, humming the music I heard in Ebenezer's room. What would it be like to travel with them? Would they teach me how to ride a unicycle? Will they tell me their secrets—how to steal money from a locked safe, how to make a hotel ceiling look like the sky, how to cut off a man's head and bring him back to life?

  But the whole time I'm also thinking about what Ebenezer told me, that my mother wanted to leave us. I've been angry with her, lots of times, but that's nothing compared to what I feel now, when I see what a hypocrite she's been. I manage to finish my chores, though, and my mother doesn't check anyone else into a dirty room.

  “Dinnertime, Liz!” my mother yells down the hallway.

  I keep working; I don't think I can face her. And I want to stay in the public areas of the hotel, in case Ebenezer's made a decision and needs to find me.

  A few minutes later, unfortunately, I see her heading toward me. “If you don't hurry up we'll start dinner without you,” she says.

  “What do you care?” I say.

  She looks startled. We argue a lot, but I've never been out-and-out rude to her.

  “You're looking for those magicians again, aren't you?” she asks.

  “So what if I am? At least I'm not planning to leave two small children. I was only five then, wasn't I?”

  “Oh. You heard about that.”

  “Yeah. I had a nice long talk with Ebenezer today. He'll probably take me with him when they go, he said so.”

  “Really,” she says. It's not a question.

  “Yeah, really. And I can see why they turned you down. I don't have any responsibilities to keep me here, not like you did.”

  “Well, they must have turned you down for some other reason, then. They checked out this afternoon.”

  At first I just stand there and stare at her. I don't even take her words in; I only know that something bad has happened, that I've just been given the worst news of my life. Then, slowly, the meaning of what she's said begins to penetrate.

  “You're lying,” I say. “You're just being spiteful.”

  “See for yourself.”

  I turn away from her and run down the hallway. I knock on Ebenezer's door, but no one answers. I take the universal key out of my pocket and open the door—and the room is clean, empty, no luggage or any sign of them at all.

  I go to the room next door, but that one's deserted too. I look all over the hotel, down the main corridor, in the reception room, the office, the kitchen, even my room. But my mother's right—they're gone.

  I sit down on my bed. How could they lie to me like this? They said they'd think about taking me. No, they said “It's a thought,” which could mean anything. I stare at the walls of my room, thinking about how ugly the paint is, how awful everything is here.

  After a while my mother comes inside without knocking. “I don't know what they told you, but they never had any intention of taking you,” she says. She sits next to me on the bed. “It's just something they do—they come to town, they show you all kinds of—of enchantment, glamour, and then they vanish. I don't know why.”

  I'm still too angry to talk to her. But through my misery I feel vaguely surprised to hear her use words like enchantment, glamour.

  “They don't care about us, you see,” she says. “They—they're not like us, maybe not even human. They visit, they have their fun, and then they leave.”

  “How the hell could you have thought about leaving us?” I say. “I was just a little kid th
en. You had responsibilities here, to me, and Dad, and—and the hotel—”

  She sighs. “That's what they make you do. You forget everything, everything but their lovely magic.”

  “They don't make you. You decided, all on your own.”

  “You know that's not true. You feel it too. And don't forget, you have your own responsibilities. You know how hard it is to manage here.” She sighs again, and smiles faintly, as if she's looking at something far away. “I asked them this time too,” she says. “When I passed them in the hallway. ‘I'm ready'—that's all I said. And he nodded at me, Ebenezer did, and I felt—well, you know what I felt.”

  She's not listening, I think. “You were going to leave us here, and—and what about the hotel? You're always telling me how important the hotel is, how we have to keep it going...”

  She laughs sadly. “Oh, Liz,” she says. “Don't you understand by now? I keep the hotel going for them. In case they come back. And it's been worth it, waiting all these years, just to see them again.”

  “You mean—all this time, all the work I did—it's just for them? Three times in twenty years? I thought—and Dad, what does he think? Does he know why you want to stay here?”

  “I think he does. He's—I'm pretty sure he talked to them himself.”

  I'm outraged now, I can't stop myself. “Do you know how selfish you're being? You had me work here like—like a slave, and all because you were waiting for them to come back. I couldn't go out, I couldn't see my friends, I barely passed my classes—” I can hardly breathe, thinking about how she's lied to me.

  “You know why, though. You feel it too.”

  “Get out of my room. I don't even want to talk to you.”

  She stands up and heads for the door. “Think about it, Liz,” she says. “You'll understand, once you calm down.”

  I sit for a while after she leaves, not doing anything. My anger's draining away now, and a picture comes into my mind, the woman on the unicycle. I hear the music again, and I wonder where they went, if they'll come back. If they visit once every ten years, I'd be twenty-five. Could I wait that long?