Hard News

theaters, the live play theaters, the angry drivers, the suicidal pedestrians. Horns blared like mad, as if everybody driving a car had a wife in labor in the backseat. Already the energy was exhausting him but he knew he’d be up to speed in a day or two.
    He stopped and bought a hot dog and ate it in three bites. At the next street corner he bought another one. This time he asked for onions too. On the third corner he bought two more hot dogs, without onions, and stood eating them and drinking a Sprite, which wasn’t a Sprite at all, which he’d asked for, but some brand of lemon-lime soda he’d never heard of. It tasted like medicine. As the vendor split a sausage to fill with sauerkraut, Nestor asked him where there was a hotel in the area.
    The man shrugged. “Donoe.”
    “Huh?”
    “Donoe.”
    “That’s a hotel?”
    “I donoe.”
    “Why don’t you try learning fucking English?” Nestor walked off. Two blocks later he saw a sign,
King’s Court Hotel
. Which was the same name as a motel he’d been to in Miami Beach once and which wasn’t a bad place. He remembered it being clean and cheap. It must have been a chain. Nestor walked up to the door, which opened suddenly. He hadn’t noticed a tall young man, dressed in black, standing inside. The man said, “Hello, sir, take your bag?”
    The Miami branch didn’t, Nestor recalled, have a doorman.
    “Just wanted to ask the desk guy a question.”
    She wasn’t a guy but a young blonde woman with a French accent and teeth that were absolutely perfect. She smiled at him. “Yessir?”
    “Uh …” He looked around him. Bizarre. It looked like a warehouse with a low ceiling. Stone and metal furniture everywhere. And a lot of the furniture was wrapped up in white cloth.
    “Uh, I was wondering, you have a room?”
    “Certainly, sir. How long will you be staying?”
    “Uh, how much would that be? For a single?”
    A computer was consulted. “Four hundred forty.”
    For a
week”?
Are these people fucking insane?
    The question now was how to get out of here without the blonde with the ruler-straight teeth thinking he was a complete asshole.
    “I mean by the night.”
    A moment’s pause. “Actually, that
is
the daily rate, sir.”
    “Sure. I was joking.” Nestor grinned, saw no way to salvage the situation and simply walked out.
    Only one block away he found the Royalton Arms, which he knew was okay because there were a couple of dirty-looking tourists standing out in front, looking at a Michelin guide to New York City. The desk clerk here didn’t even have straight teeth, let alone white ones, and he was behind a Plexiglas bulletproof divider. Nestor checked into a $39.95 room and took the elevator up to the seventh floor. The room was okay. He felt good as soon as he walked inside. It didn’t overlook any oceans or expressways or anything else except an air shaft but that didn’t bother Nestor. He lowered the window blinds then lay down on the bed and listened to the argument his stomach was having with the hot dogs.
    He clicked on the TV and watched some
Miami Vice
rerun for a while, flipped through the channels once then shut off the set. It was irritating not to have a remote control. He stripped down to his boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, brushed his teeth powerfully and got into bed.
    He closed his eyes.
    Snap
. The pictures began.
    Nestor often had trouble sleeping. He’d thought, a long time ago, it was something physical. Well,
hoped
more than
thought
. But he knew now that wasn’t the case at all.
    The reason for his insomnia was the pictures.
    The minute his head hit the pillow (unless there was someone next to him, distracting him or at least promising distraction), the minute he was prepared to sleep, the pictures began. He supposed he could call them memories because they really were nothing more than scenes from his past. But memories were different. Memories were like the impressions he had of his family or his childhood. His first car. His first fuck. Maybe they were accurate. Probably not.
    But the pictures … Man. Every detail perfect.
    A Philippine revolutionary he picked off at three hundred yards using an M16 with metal sights, the man just dropping like a sack …
    A black South African who thought he was safely across the border in Botswana …
    A coat hanger binding the hands of a Salvadorian, Nestor thinking, Why bother to tie him up? He’ll have a bullet in his head in sixty seconds anyway….
    Hundreds of