I sat up quickly. My brain followed later. I found I was huddled against the back of a building, partly covered in leaves. There were a couple of boarded-up windows and doors with rusty locks, the disused backs of shops on the other side. In front lay a small park. There were bushes and trees, at least, though the ground was paved in granite cobblestones. The buildings on the other side were made of dark stone, a uniform three stories high. A couple of other guys reclined on benches, most under dismantled cardboard boxes. More professional about their situation than I was, in other words.
The thing I’d seen when I first opened my eyes was a totem pole, or something like it. Big and wooden and primitive, certainly. There were several more dotted around, including one that looked like a pair of misshapen monsters wrestling, or about to wring each other’s necks. The site collided heavily with dreams I must have been having, full of darkness and violence, of shouts in rooms where the air was dead. With looking for my father in the house where I grew up and not being able to find him.
My watch said it was ten past six in the morning. I was surprised I still had it. I hurriedly checked and discovered I also retained my phone, Amy’s phone, and my wallet. Either the local thieves weren’t up to much or they just hadn’t wanted to get close to me. My face and hands hurt, but the physical discomfort was nothing compared to how I felt emotionally and spiritually. I assumed I must still be in Seattle, but otherwise the map was blank. I’m not a heavy drinker, most of the time. I don’t find myself in these kinds of situations, and I have neither the skills nor the experience to deal with them. I felt sick and afraid. I stood up, hoping this would help.
“Sir, are you okay?”
I turned sluggishly to see a guy with a bicycle was standing six feet away. “Is this Seattle?”
“Occidental Park, sir,” the guy said, coming closer. He was wearing a white cycling helmet, and his jacket was white, too. Everything about him was clean and upstanding—and white. He was like me with the word “not” in front.
“Which is in Seattle, right?” I asked doggedly, and immediately regretted it. While obviously not an actual cop, it was clear the bike guy occupied some kind of semiofficial law-and-order capacity. Could you be arrested in this town just for being an asshole?
“Yes, sir. You’re a couple of blocks from Pioneer Square, if that means anything.”
It did. I was actually only about five minutes’ walk from where I could last recall being. “Look, I’m fine. Had a couple drinks too many, that’s all.”
He nodded, politely avoiding loading the action with too much No shit.
“Are you hurt?” He was looking at my face.
“Slipped on a steep sidewalk, banged myself up some.”
“You lost anything overnight?”
I went through my pockets again, for his benefit. “Everything’s present and accounted for,” I said, hoping the choice of words would signal I was a stranger to this kind of situation. In fact it just made me look worse, like a half-senile old woman talking incessantly to prove she’s not half senile.
“Do you have somewhere to stay?”
“Got a car. Will be driving home. Today.”
“Wouldn’t be in any hurry,” he said. “And some breakfast would be a good idea.”
He got back on his bike and pedaled off.
I walked out of the park. A single block got me to First, a right and another couple hundred yards to Pioneer Square. This is a small triangle rather than an actual square, with First on one edge, Yesler on another, the third arm cobbled over along with the rest of the “square.” None of the sides is as much as fifty yards long. It has a paved area with a seating area protected by Victorian-style ironwork, trees, a drinking fountain with an Indian’s head on it, and a totem pole, this one a taller and a more explicable straight-up-and-down affair.
I stood outside the Starbucks across the way, which wasn’t yet open, and looked at the trees. There were people out sweeping the streets. One raised an eyebrow as he passed and paused, as if offering me the opportunity to be gathered up into his pile of detritus and cleaned up out of public sight. It was quite amusing, but I could have done without it. I still felt physically desperate, but I was no longer in the location where I’d woken up, and so I could start pretending that it hadn’t really happened. The closing stages of the previous evening were opaque, the parts after the fight, but now that I could see it across the square, I distantly remembered being in a bar there called Doc Maynard’s, perched belligerently on a stool in a dark and crowded room, knowing I was far past the point of recovery and deciding I might as well follow the road and see where it led. Very wise. I wished I could go back and stand next to this other self and punch him in the mouth. It ends with you waking in a park! I would have shouted. How fucking cool is that?
I decided to take the advice of the man in white and get some breakfast, specifically the kind that is hot and wet and comes in cups. If I was going to do what I guessed I now had to do, then not smelling too obviously of alcohol would be better. I lit a cigarette to gird my soul for the long, cold hack up to Pike Place Market, the one place presumably doing business at this hour. My head hurt in three ways. I had localized but significant pains in my back, neck, and right hand. My mouth felt like a seabed that had been drained after years of environmental disaster had rendered it ecologically dead.
But none of these was the real problem.
The problem was that over the last six months I had come to be concerned that my wife’s feelings toward me had changed, and that yesterday I’d started to wonder if she might be actually having an affair. And that if either was true, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
About her or about myself.
I sat in a waiting room for forty minutes reading grim posters and moving my feet occasionally to let people walk past. Some of them were sad, some of them were angry, some were shouting, some looked like they’d never say anything again. I had consumed enough coffee and weapons-grade headache pills to feel both a little better and a lot worse. I’d brushed my teeth and changed into a new shirt I’d bought on the way. As far as anyone could tell, I hoped, I looked almost like a normal person.
Eventually a guy in shirtsleeves and a tie appeared out of a door in back and said my name. I followed him down a corridor and into a room that had no windows. He introduced himself as Detective Blanchard and indicated for me to sit down at the other side of a table.
He spent a few minutes looking through the information I’d given earlier, and I found my hands tightening on the metal arms of the chair. The room was small and had gray walls and was not designed to provide diversion. I was stuck with watching the detective as he tried to memorize the stuff in front of him—or perhaps translated it to Chinook in his head. He was comfortably overweight, with soft-looking skin and pale, wispy hair that looked as if it was rapidly deserting his head to leave him looking even more like a large, confident baby. I tried to ignore everything else and concentrate on breathing deeply and evenly. I could feel it not working.
“My wife,” I repeated fifteen minutes later, “is missing. Which word are you finding problematic?”
“Define ‘missing’ for me.”
“She is not in the hotel where she’s supposed to be.”
“So she checked out.”
“She never checked in. They have no reservation for her. As it says in those notes.”
“Was it a Hilton? We got a few of those. Maybe you went to the wrong one.”
“No,” I said. “It was the Malo, as you also know if you were actually reading what’s there in front of you.”
“The Malo. Nice. What does she do, your wife?”
“Advertising.”
He nodded, as if Amy’s occupation explained something significant about her or me. “Travel on business often?”