N THE MORNING, Albertine called three real-estate agencies to list the hotel with them, and in the afternoon I ferried a dozen realtors out to look the place over.  They spent more than an hour with Albertine, going through the buildings, walking along the beach, and listing the assets and appurtenances.  Every time I crossed paths with the group, one or another of them was using the word charming, so it came as quite a shock when they suggested an asking price considerably lower than what we had invested over the years. 
   “Is that just for the hotel,” I asked, “or —?” 
   “That would be for everything,” said Jeffrey, a fat and florid fellow who had assumed the role of spokesrealtor for the group. 
   “The hotel and the island?” I asked.  Jeffrey laughed as if this were a joke, and I developed a strong negative attitude toward Jeffrey.  “Does that mean yes or no?” I asked. 
   “It — um — it means yes,” said Jeffrey. 
   “The cottages, too?” asked Albertine. 
   Jeffrey nodded.  No one said anything for a while, and when the silence had grown embarrassing, Jeffrey shrugged and grimaced and said, “Of course you can ask more if you like, but I understood that you were eager to sell.” 
   “We are,” said Albertine. 
   “But not that eager,” I said. 
   “Well,” said Jeffrey, standing and beginning to put his papers into his briefcase to signal that he had decided that it would probably not be worth his time to try to make me listen to reason, “perhaps you’d like to talk it over and give us a call when you’ve settled on a price.”  He snapped the briefcase shut. 
   “Yes,” I said.  “Yes.  We’d like to do that.  Talk it over.  I’ll — uh — take you back to the mainland — and Albertine and I will — we’ll talk it over.” 
   I got up and walked out of the room and out of the hotel and began walking toward the dock.  The realtors followed.  I stayed in the lead, moving quickly enough to stay ahead of the realtors so that I wouldn’t have to talk to them, because I didn’t want to have to listen to them appraise my hotel, my island, my life, my folly.  I didn’t want to hear how little they thought it was worth, and I didn’t want to give them the opportunity to convince me that they were right.  I didn’t say a word to them throughout the trip across the bay, and I mumbled my goodbyes when I left them at the town dock. 

ON THE WAY back home, when I was about halfway back, I throttled down and chugged along slowly to give myself some time to think.  The bay was calm.  The pale afternoon light flickering on the surface struck an autumnal note of things drawing to a close, of time running out.  I was just beginning to try to sing the chorus to “September Song” when I spotted a rowboat ahead with someone standing in it, waving his arms.  When I drew closer, I saw that it was my rowboat and that the armwaver was Lou, the grumpy guy.  I pulled the launch alongside. 
   “Perfect timing!” Lou sang out.  “This thing really does leak.”  The water was a couple of inches below the gunwales.  I threw Lou a line, and when the rowboat was secure for towing, I extended a hand to him. Clambering aboard the launch, Lou said, “I was sitting there saying to myself, ëLou, if you get out of this alive, it’s time you recognized that most of the sand in the hourglass of life is in the bottom half,’ you know what I mean?” 
   “Yeah,” I said, and after that I did not say another thing until the evening, when it was time to read “Have You Ever Wondered Why Microphones Don’t Resemble Ears?” the third episode of Dead Air. 

IN MY BEDSIDE TABLE, I kept a small radio with an earphone.  The battery was nearly dead, and something was wrong with the volume control, which made the sound rise or fall unpredictably when I tried to adjust it, but if the atmospheric conditions were right and if I rotated the radio until I had it aligned so that the signal was at its strongest, I could still pull Baldy in. 
   “Well, Bob,” Baldy said above the static, “it’s about time to make another entry in the catalog, isn’t it?” 
   “Yeah,” said Bob. 
   “Gather ’round the radio, boys and girls, ’cause it’s time to open Baldy’s Catalog of Human Misery.” This announcement was followed, as always, by a creaking sound, as if the catalog were contained in an enormous box with rusty hinges.  “Yes, indeedy.  Every night at this time, we bring our listeners fresh proof that things could be worse, don’t we, Bob?” 
   “Yeah.” 
   “You know how it is, boys and girls — some days you think that things will never go right for you.  You begin to think dark thoughts about slipping into eternal night, and you wonder whether anyone would even miss you, am I right?” 
   “Yeah.” 
   “I wasn’t talking to you, Bob.”  He dropped his voice and said, “I was talking to you, listener.  When those dark thoughts threaten to get the best of you, I am here to bring you comfort!  Every night I bring you the story of someone, somewhere, suffering a misery more miserable than yours.  Tonight, I want to tell you about a woman who was living with her three children in a housing project somewhere, anywhere, who knows where.  Things were not going well, not at all.  In fact, things got to be so bad that, a few nights ago, she got to thinking her dark thoughts about eternal night, and wondering whether anyone would even miss her if she were gone, and whether things would ever be any better for her children than they were for her, and many more things that it is not given to us to know, and in her misery she went up to the roof of her apartment building and she pitched her three small children from the roof, one by one, and then threw herself off after them.”  Silence, a long silence.  Then, “File that under ëInconsolables,’would you Bob?” 
   “Yeah.” 
   “Boys and girls, that’s despair, the real thing, the bottom, bad as it gets, not the blues, not the mopes, not that nameless dissatisfaction you feel.  If you are not all the way down there where that woman was, then take heart!  Your little life could be much, much worse.  You just roll that rock in front of your cave, and you sleep tight.  Tomorrow is another day.” 
   There was a brief silence, but I didn’t switch my radio off.  I waited.  In a moment, Baldy laughed his wooden laugh and added, almost inaudibly, “Well, Bob, that ought to satisfy the little —” and then the microphone was switched off abruptly, and I switched my radio off and lay there in silence, wondering what, exactly, had made that woman so miserable, so desperate, waiting for sleep, hoping for sleep. 

With Kraft’s typical skill, erudition and levity, it broaches the very nature of the human condition.

Leaving Small’s Hotel is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $14.00. 

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Leaving Small’s Hotel is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

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Leaving Small’s Hotel was first published on May 11, 1998, by Picador USA, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010. 

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