The Duration Read online

  “Dude,” he said. “Do whatever you think you need to do.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Just, you know, consider the repercussions before you do it, okay?”

  He checked his watch and wiggled his shoulders.

  “I have a date with a yoga class. Loosen up the old chakras.”

  He headed for the corridor back to the spa.

  “See you back at the room, okay?”

  I nodded to him. He raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Okay?” he said again.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Make good choices.”

  The corporate types emerged from the corridor, three men and a woman swaddled in white robes. The men were red-cheeked and damp, laughing. The woman trailed them, dry, a little slow, eyeing the hot tubs skeptically.

  They nodded at us and fanned out across the baths, emitting various sounds of wonder. One of them approached the egret, regarded it closely, seemed to sniff at it. Jimmer took the opportunity to drift back out of the room.

  “What’s that?” said another, looking at the horn. “A tusk?”

  They had circled back to the center of the room, around the hot tubs.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” said the third, a heavyset fellow in his fifties, probably. “A soak tub. None of that eucalyptus business.”

  “What’s that?” the birdwatcher asked, standing at the edge of the cold dip pool.

  “That’s an ice plunge,” said the heavyset dude. “They got one of these at the club down on Necker. You don’t want none of that, unless you want your balls back up in your belly.”

  He laughed, and the other two men joined him. The woman hesitated for just a second, just long enough to compel the rest to acknowledge her. Then she laughed too, indulgent with a hint of derision, and the rest of them stopped.

  It was time for lunch.

  I wandered back up to the dining room. Six of the tables were filled. Some guests I recognized—the movie star, talking to himself, the Asian trio, the mother and daughter. The others seemed looser, more relaxed. At the entrance, Tudd appeared and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Welcome, Mr. Johansson, to Sustenance at Head-Connect.”

  He led me to an empty table. The utensils were silver. The linens were starched. A personalized menu lay on my place. My name was written across the top in some midcentury font. Beneath it was an abbreviated list of my vitals—age, height and weight, body mass, length of stay, a series of codes I couldn’t decipher. On the back was a schedule of my workout times and a place for me to write in the elective activities I’d chosen.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “No grace here at Head-Connect,” said Tudd. “We’re nondenominational. We do, however, promote conscious eating. We find that even in sustenance, it is imperative to take purpose and proportionality into account.”

  I looked at the list again.

  “I got to tell you, man. This is a depressing way to start lunch.”

  Tudd smiled.

  “Exactly,” he said. “But let me check with you again at the end of your stay, see then whether you’re depressed.”

  He stood up.

  “Now please excuse me. Should you have questions, just ask any helper. I will see you for your afternoon workout.”

  He smiled at me and left.

  As soon as he’d cleared the dining room, a young woman brought beets, thick and bleeding on a white plate. Coral salt. A thimbleful of yak butter. I looked at the menu again. Lunch was three courses. The beets were followed by Kale-Smoke over Dorado, which sounded more like a Western than an entree, then sorbet with cilantro foam.

  “Excuse me,” I said to her as she set the plate down.

  She was young, a kid. A healthy glow to her cheeks. There was something vaguely Canadian about her.

  I picked up the menu. Under my name, in the list of abbreviations, I pointed to one of the numbers I didn’t understand, an abbreviation that read “.382 bvo.”

  “What’s this one?” I asked, and put my finger to it.

  The young woman looked where I was pointing and squinted her eyes. Then she smiled meekly and begged off.

  “Sorry,” she said, shrugging. “I’m afraid I can’t. Sorry.”

  “Is everything all right?” asked Ava Winston, who’d slipped in behind me.

  I turned in my chair.

  Ava nodded to the server, who excused herself. I motioned for Ava to sit.

  “What’s this number?” I asked Ava, pointing at it again.

  She looked.

  “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” she said.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  She smiled.

  “I do know.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do too, and if you’re not careful I will tell you. What was it again?”

  I showed her.

  “Hmm,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “That explains a lot.”

  She held that pose for a second, then laughed.

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll have it up by the end of the week.”

  I couldn’t tell if this was bullshit or not.

  “Dude, come on,” I said, and she slapped her leg and laughed. She was a lot prettier than I remembered.

  I cut into my beets.

  “I hope these will help,” I said.

  She chuckled and looked at the plate.

  “Nowhere to go but up,” she said, and laughed a little more.

  “Wow,” I said, lifting my fork.

  She calmed herself and looked around the dining room.

  “I have to do the rounds,” she said. “Everything good so far?”

  I nodded, chewing. The beets were pretty great, actually.

  “Where was Jimmer this morning?”

  I swallowed.

  “Jimmer’s in his own world.”

  She nodded. “We get that a lot. How about you? How’s Tudd treating you?”

  “Dude is killing me.”

  She smiled.

  “I assigned him especially for you, Pete. You’ll thank me later.”

  It was nice talking to her. We had an old bond, a shared history, but this interaction felt independent of that. It felt natural, unfettered, modern. Would she be busting on me in this vaguely flirtatious way if I was a complete stranger? I liked to think so. This is what attractive, well-adjusted people do.

  “Let me thank you tonight,” I said. “Buy you a drink?”

  Ava’s eyes sparkled a little bit, but then she pursed her lips. “No alcohol on campus. And certainly no fraternizing with the guests.”

  “No alcohol?”

  She shook her head.

  “And no caffeine?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, that one’s negotiable. But generally speaking we limit that stuff. It’s important to walk the walk, you know? Solidarity.”

  I showed her my menu again.

  “Do you have one of these?”

  She pointed to her head.

  “Mine’s all up here.”

  “Tell me something, Ava,” I said, playing out the hand. “Are you, like, incredibly healthy?”

  She snorted, endearingly.

  “Well, I still have my weaknesses, Pete So Handsome. But let’s focus on you.”

  She stood up to leave.

  “So no on the drink, then?”

  I clicked my teeth like she didn’t know what she was missing.

  “You’re still that guy, aren’t you?” she said. But she was smiling.

  I gave her my best Han Solo.

  “And then some.”

  Ava Winston shook her head, a kind of nonverbal “please.” I was playing to my strength, frustrating but irresistible. Seemed to be getting it half right.

  She sighed.

  “Enjoy your lunch, Mr. Johansson.”

  She walked off to check in with another table. I didn’t even try not to watch her.
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br />   I finished my lunch and checked my schedule. I had a couple of hours before my next date with Tudd and nothing on the calendar. The options were numerous: Nordic in the back woods, entry-level aikido, mindfulness meditation, a documentary on the Rarámuri Indians of Mexico, who could run for three days straight. I walked up the pebbled path to the guest wings, considering a nap.

  It felt good to flirt with Ava Winston. Surprising, but good. Good to focus on the future. She was fun. She knew where I came from, and came from the same place, sort of. But she’d transcended it, gotten herself here, which technically was the same place but different. This place had helped her. I revved up my inner Jimmer. Look at this beautiful establishment. Look at this attention to self-realization, this focus on what tomorrow could be. Look at these women who knew our measurements and accepted them. Was it not wonderful?

  I thought of Chickie in his cold lockup. If I could get him here, would it help? No. If I brought him here, if he kept digging around, he’d find out about the horn, and then he’d never let it go.

  I ran through the other options. Let’s say we just told Head-Connect the whole story. Let’s say I got a sit-down with Arvindo Blanc or Tudd or whoever was pulling the strings in Nevada and explained how my high school buddy really wanted to return their mid-six-figure artifact to the unmapped woodland because that’s where he thought it belonged. Would they indulge us? What if we offered to replace the horn with something of equal value?

  Hah.

  What if I just let the thing go? As Jimmer said, let it cease to exist. Could it just not exist, even though I’d seen it? Wouldn’t that be better?

  That would be better.

  I entered the guest wing and saw the movie star and the mother-daughter hustling across the lobby. The movie star looked at me. I nodded to him.

  “Beginners aikido?” he said, pointing to a hallway that led to some distant studio. “About to start.”

  “Yeah,” I said, turning to follow along. “Cool.”

  “Tell the story,” Jimmer said. “The one about the Beechers.”

  It was later in the day. Jimmer, Unsie, and I were sitting at one of the Heirloom’s round tables with Vishy Shetty and her assistant and the minor movie star and the Asian guys and a couple of regulars, telling ghost stories. Popcorn from a shallow bowl was scattered like sawdust across the table. Ginny Archey brushed kernels aside and set down a cold pitcher of beer.

  “I know that one,” Ginny said. “I hate that one.”

  Jimmer smiled. He’d sprung Vishy Shetty from Head-Connect on the premise that he’d show her Edith Wharton’s estate, a small chateau called the Mount, hidden at the end of a long path through the woods. A famous American director with an India fetish had recently announced his intention to do a remake of The Age of Innocence, and Vishy Shetty was eyeing it as her comeback vehicle.

  Jimmer knew all that because Jimmer knew everything. He had two phones and eight screens on him at all times.

  We’d all worked at the Mount as kids before we got jobs at Tanglewood, and then, later, at the Red Lion Inn, parking cars for the garden tours on the thousand-degree summer days. Menial service jobs in which we tried to hide our scorn for the tourists and they tried to hide their scorn for us. Once, on a particularly humid afternoon, an ice-cream vendor drove in the main gates and wound his way down the dirt road to the concession stand, and forgot to latch his rear door after the delivery, so the door swung open on the way out and—would you believe it?—a box of Dove Bars fell through. Forty-eight of them, vanilla dipped in chocolate, retailing at the concession for four bucks a pop. A gift from God. Chickie found the box just outside the main gate, lying on the side of the road. We ate them all.

  Showing Vishy Shetty (and her assistant) Edith Wharton’s estate took about fifteen minutes, as it was only a mile down the road from Head-Connect and closed in the winter. The Mount was famous for its gardens and its ghosts, but the gardens lay fallow in March and the ghosts didn’t answer doorbells, so after a few minutes stamping around in the cold, Jimmer pitched our guests an oral history of the county’s haunting, complete with local color and beer, as a tool to assist Vishy Shetty’s nascent character study. Vishy Shetty appeared reluctant until Jimmer also promised to let her check out his phone. The others leapt at the jailbreak, even though they’d been at Head-Connect less than twenty-four hours.

  I poured a golden curl of beer into my tilted mug, letting an inch-high head form at the top of the glass and drift down the sides. The mug sat on the table, and I held it at arm’s length, nestled between my fingers, debating. It was Saturday evening. I’d worked out twice, filled a small notebook with observations about Master Ueshiba’s “way of unifying,” and washed my quinoa salad down with pomegranate-infused bubble tea. Ava Winston was giving a presentation on winter revenue streams in the back offices, and Tudd was texting me about a moonlight snowshoe class he thought I’d enjoy. But it seemed best to pace this transition, so when Jimmer asked me to skip out with them, I said sure.

  Gable had plenty of ghost stories to choose from, dating back centuries, and every couple of years a new one seemed to pop up. Ginny Archey had already told the one about the glowing gravestone on October Mountain; the stone marked the burial site of an early Becket settler named Hand, a man shot for assaulting his neighbor’s wife. The night he faced the squad was a muggy night. A vengeful crowd bayed in the square, while across town the neighbor’s wife was in the sheriff’s office recanting. Turns out they were lovers. As Hand stood blindfolded, a huge clap of thunder had split the sky, and rain started to fall in thick sheets. The crowd began to riot, and the sergeant at arms, having not heard from the sheriff, ordered five men with four bullets to fire. The muskets flashed like lightning, and Hand was no more. Now, on stormy summer nights, kids who went up there to park swore his headstone lit up like a lantern.

  Between you and me, though, it was just headlights. The road through October Mountain dipped and curved, and at one spot near the burial grounds, your high beams could split two trees and light up a tablet 50 yards away. Especially if it was wet. Everything else was a tale passed down through generations of boys trying to get to second base.

  It’d never worked, either.

  There were other tales, newer ones, less utilitarian, like Kristin Sparrow swearing that water goblins wrapped their green fingers around her sister’s ankles in the cold depths of Otis Pond, and Bud Park’s claim that something unseen had pushed him to turn his shotgun on himself in his West Normanton tree blind three falls ago. Bud Park had lost his left ear and some of the sensation in his hands, and had stumbled out of the woods swearing that he wasn’t suicidal.

  “I think maybe those spirits came out of a bottle,” Ginny Archey had snorted at that one, echoing the consensus at the time that Park was ambushed not by anything supernatural but by the dovetailing influences of an impending divorce and Johnnie Walker Red. Still, it got added to the list.

  Unsie had started to tell the one about the hard men of North Ford who drank themselves stupid every Thursday so that when they walked home they wouldn’t see the ghosts of the kids who died in a factory fire in 1911, but he stopped himself. That wasn’t a fun one. Which left the Beecher story. It had a lot going for it, a historical distance, some nice touches, a relatively respectable denouement, and our crowd was hanging on each word. When folks like Vishy Shetty start throwing their charisma at you, it’s hard not to get caught up.

  I wrapped my hand around my mug and brought the beer to my lips for a long swallow. Truth be told, I hated these stories. They were exhausting. But I told them anyway.

  “You know how over by Ventfort, in the woods behind Fred Carter’s place, by the old road, there’s that big old foundation in the ground. That was the Beecher estate back in the 1910s or so.”

  I had the table already. Even the Asian guys were listening.

  “Well, so, Augustus Beecher is looking for a summer home for his family away from New York City. He has a young wife and a bab
y on the way and he’s feeling pretty flush with money from his family’s import-export business. So he starts building this big house up here in the woods. Place is a palace, marble floors, oak walls, lots of curtains and drapes. Two pianos. And they’re just about finished in the spring of 1914, getting ready to spend the summer up here. Augustus’s wife is from Montreal, and she’s eight months pregnant, and she wants to get into the country and away from the city as soon as she can.”

  I took another sip of my beer. Nobody else spoke.

  “But then the war starts, the Beechers aren’t positioned right. They start losing business. Augustus has expensive taste, MC Hammer taste, and likes to play the ponies. Pretty soon, he’s in trouble. He starts looking for a quick score, and you know how that is.”

  You know how that is.

  It was windy and cold out and the sun was long behind the whistling hills.

  “So he’s looking for a quick score to get him out of the hole he’s in, but he keeps making it worse and worse, and then he’s in real long-term, poorhouse trouble. So he starts thinking about selling the house up here, but who’s going to buy a big place out in the woods in that economy? Nobody, that’s who. And Augustus knows it. So one day in the late spring, he tells his wife that he’s going to come up to the country to see a guy about the horses—they have horses—and he rides up in his car. It’s a rainy day, and it takes forever to get here, but Augustus is pretty desperate at this point. It’s dark when he finally gets into town and drives up the old road to his house. The house is just about done, there’s only some final shingling left to do on the stable, and Augustus stands in the driveway looking at the house and imagining the summers up here with his family. He doesn’t go in—he can’t bear it. But he takes a gasoline canister from his car and pours the gas around the house—along the porch, and the walls. He splashes some up onto the eaves. Then he stands back and tosses on a match. The house is insured and Augustus figures the insurance money will get him out of debt. Nobody but his wife knows where he is, and the house is at the end of a long driveway where nobody can see it. Augustus figures he can drive back to the city that night.”