What I Loved

exhaustion, had an expression that made made me think of the small terrified animals I had seen so often on Vermont roads in the headlights of my car. Appalled, I turned away and made an attempt to replace the inhuman stare I had seen in the mirror with a man's gaze and to thank Arnie for his kindness. He was standing near the door with his arms folded beneath the words HOLY CROSS LITTLE LEAGUE which ran across the front of his blue sweatshirt. "Are you sure you don't want a doctor or at least an ice pack or something?''
    "No," I said. "I can't thank you enough."
    Arnie lingered for a moment in front of the door. His eyes met mine. "Those punks were harassing you, weren't they?"
    I could only nod. His pity was nearly beyond what I could bear at that moment.
    "Well, good night," he said. "I hope your back's better in the morning." Then he shut the door.
    I left the bathroom light on. Because I couldn't lie flat, I propped myself up with pillows and plied myself with Scotch from the minibar. That muted the worst of the pain, for a short time anyway. All night I had motion sickness. Even when the spasms in my back woke me and I remembered where I was, I felt that the bed was moving, moving against my will, and whenever I slept, I was still moving in a dream—on a plane or a boat or a train or an escalator. Waves of nausea coursed through me, and my intestines churned as though I had been poisoned. In the dreams, I boarded one vehicle after another and listened to the sound of my heart pounding like an old clock, and it wasn't until I woke that I understood that the muscle was silent. When I opened my eyes and tried to shake off that sickening illusion of movement, consciousness brought Giles's fingers to my hair and his hands tightening around my face. The humiliation burned me, and I wanted to expel the memory, to force it out of my chest and lungs, where it had lodged itself like a fire in my body. I wanted to think, to turn to what had happened and make sense of it. I began to ponder what I had seen in the room—the sheet, the rope, the gun, the leftover food. It had looked like a crime scene, but even while I was seeing it, even while I was staring into the room, I had intimated a hint of the fake. The gun might have been a toy. The blood, colored water—all of it a setup. But then Giles's touch came back to me. That had been real. A sore lump had formed at the back of my head where my skull had hit the wall.
    And Mark? All night his face had come and gone before me, and I knew that his last words had given me hope. People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope. His words gave me hope, and crumpled up in that bed I heard them again and again in my mind. "I'll go home with you tomorrow.'' He had hidden that statement from Giles, and this fact opened another possible interpretation of his acts. Some part of his damaged person wanted to go home. Weak and vacillating, Mark had been infected by the stronger personality of Giles, who had an almost hypnotic power over him, but there was another place inside him, the place Bill had always insisted was there—a room where he held on to those who loved him and whom he loved. I had called out to him, and he had answered me. A tormented combination of hope and guilt carried me into the morning. I had said a terrible thing to Mark when I'd spoken to him about his father's painting. At the time, I had believed it, but I suffered from the conviction that my comparison had been monstrous. A thing should never be measured against a person. Never. I take it back, I said to him in my mind. I take it back. And then, as if it were a footnote to my thoughts, I remembered that I had read somewhere, perhaps it was in Gershom Scholem, that in Hebrew "to repent" and "to return" are the same word.
    But Mark didn't come to meet me in the lobby at ten o'clock, and when I called his room, no one answered. I waited a full hour for him. The man who sat on a bench in that lobby had made Herculean efforts to look presentable. He had shaved, holding his head sideways to prevent further injury to his back. He had vigorously rubbed the stain on his pants leg with soap and water, despite the excruciating jerks the cleaning gave his spine. He had combed his hair, and when he sat down on that bench to wait, he had contorted his body into a position he imagined might look normal. He scanned the lobby. He hoped. He revised his earlier interpretation of