ARLY IN THE MORNING, I ferried our three guests back to the mainland.  Dick and Jane sat in the bow with their arms around each other for the whole trip.  They had told Albertine, while they were checking out, that their stay at Small’s had “really meant something,” and they had made a reservation for a week’s stay at the end of October, so that they could hear the last of my readings.  I was flattered when Albertine told me that, and I wanted to tell Dick and Jane that I was pleased and flattered, but now, I could see, they wanted to be alone.  We must give the ends of things their due, even things as familiar as weekends, even the end of a day, or else there is no rhythm to our lives. 
   “You should be flattered,” said Lou, nudging me and whispering. 
   “What?” I said. 
   Lou nodded toward Dick and Jane.  “They’re experiencing the sense of loss that we feel at the end of a piece of life that we can identify as a piece.” 
   “I know what you mean.” 
   “They’ll remember their weekend with you, as a piece of life apart from the other pieces.” 
   “‘Honey,’” I said in a fair-to-good imitation of Jane’s voice, “‘remember that weekend we spent at that little hotel with the leaking roof and the moribund boiler?  What a dump!  What was the name of that place again?’” 
   Lou laughed as if I had said something funny. 
   At the dock, when all of us made our good-byes, Lou said, “See you later, buddy,” which I took to mean “Good-bye forever, shithead.” 

LATER IN THE MORNING, Albertine and I waited at the dock for the arrival of one of the realtors who had toured the island a couple of days earlier, Liza, who was bringing a prospective buyer.  Liza and her client made the crossing in what looked like a duck blind with an outboard motor on it.  The hull was painted olive drab with splotches of black, brown, and beige, in the style of army camouflage.  The cabin was thatched with reeds.  As the boat approached, I found myself sidling up to our launch, placing a possessive hand on it, and standing a little taller.  My heart swelled with pride.  I was the owner of the better boat. 
  The prospective buyer, Mr. Fillmore, was a small man dressed in a mechanic’s jumpsuit.  To my eye, and I admit that I do not have the trained eye of an experienced realtor, Mr. Fillmore didn’t look as if he could raise the cash to buy Small’s, but Liza seemed to regard him as a hot prospect.  “Mr. Fillmore represents a group that is very interested in acquiring a property like yours,” she said when she introduced him, and then, raising herself on her toes, she winked at Albertine and me over Mr. Fillmore’s buzz-cut head.  I wasn’t sure whether she meant the wink to mean that he was a wealthy eccentric or just a poor deluded sucker. 
   “Thinking of going into the hotel business, are you, Mr. Fillmore?” I asked chummily, as one poor deluded sucker to another. 
   He glared at me, much the way Spike had glared at Matthew when she had accused him of insulting her mother. 
   “Mr. Fillmore and his people are thinking of turning the island into a training facility,” Liza said brightly. 
   “Oh?” said Al. 
   Mr. Fillmore snapped his head in her direction and said, “Do you know that 99 percent of Americans are untrained?” 
   “I didn’t,” said Al, “but I guess I could have guessed — ” 
   “We’re sitting on a time bomb,” said Fillmore, and he cracked his knuckles. 
   “I see what you mean,” I said, lying.  “An untrained citizenry —” 
   Mr. Fillmore ignored me.  He began striding off the dock and onto the island.  The three of us caught up with him and nodded our heads while he waved his hands and sketched his plans in the air.  “This could work,” he said.  “We drop you here by night.  Parachute.  Your mission: penetrate the redoubt —” 
   “The redoubt?” I asked. 
   “The hotel,” Liza explained with a smile. 
   “— and terminate all targeted personnel,” said Mr. Fillmore.  He stopped and stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the hotel,  where, to judge from the expression on his face, no targeted personnel had been left standing. 
   “I take it you won’t be training people to flip burgers,” said Al. 
   “Or you have your alternate scenario —” Mr. Fillmore went on. 
   “Can’t wait,” I said. 
   “You’re chained to the wall of the dungeon below the redoubt —” 
   “Whoops,” I said, frowning and shaking my head.  “I’m afraid the old redoubt hasn’t got a dungeon.” 
   “That will be taken care of,” said Mr. Fillmore confidently. 
   “Sure,” I said.  “Of course.  Why not?” 
   “Your mission: escape from the dungeon, and then terminate all targeted personnel.” 
   “Ah!  I detect a pattern,” I said. 
   “I want to do a little more recon,” said Mr. Fillmore, looking each of us in the eye in turn.  “Any problem with that?” 
   “No, no,” said Albertine.  “You go right ahead and do all the recon you want.” 
   “Are there any special features you’d like me to point out to Mr. Fillmore?” Liza asked enthusiastically. 
   “Let’s see,” I said.  “There’s the old mine field out in that area somewhere.”  I swept my hand vaguely in the direction of the center of the island.  “But you’ll probably find it on your own, an old hand like you.” 
   “Let’s move out.” 
   “Oh!” I said, snapping my fingers.  “One more thing.  Did I mention that the boiler might blow up at any time?” 

ALBERTINE and I had the dining room to ourselves that night.  After dinner, I built a fire in the lounge, and I began reading the sixth episode of Dead Air, “Flying Saucers: The Untold Story,” to an audience of one. 

I LAY IN THE DARK feeling miserable.  I twisted this way.  I twisted that way. 
   “Okay, what is it?” asked Al. 
   “I’m not happy,” I said. 
   “You’d be happier if you were asleep.” 
   “I’ve been lying here telling myself that I ought to be happy, that there is no insurmountable reason for me not to be happy.  I have told myself that I owe it to you to be happy, so that you can be happy —” 
   “I’d be happy if you were asleep.” 
   “— but everything seems to block the way to my happiness, all the mistakes I’ve made in life — all the disappointments — there they are, heaped upon the road ahead of me like the sand that the surging tide dumps on a shore road in a storm.  Shoveling it all away seems much too much for me to do now, so late in life, with so much sand on the road, so much sand in the bottom of the hourglass.  I can’t get to my future.  The sands of error and disappointment block the way.” 
   “Why don’t you jot that thought down and go to sleep?” 
   “That’s not quite right,” I continued.  “It’s more like having blundered into a swamp, lost my way.  It’s hot, steamy.  The heat is debilitating, enervating.  A swarm of tiny mistakes envelopes my head like a cloud.  In constant motion, they hum around me.  I flap my hands, wave them away, but there are too many for me to dispel.  Disappointments — enormous beetles the size of rats — click and clatter around my feet, biting my ankles and heels with their pincers.  I’ll never get out of this swamp, never walk in the sun again.” 
   She seemed to be asleep. 
   I tried to lie still and work on the swamp metaphor.  I had the feeling that I was on to something.  I began cataloging the mistakes in the maddening swarm, the mistakes — my mistakes — that had led me into the swamp.  First, and worst, my decision to buy the hotel.  It now seemed wrong on all counts.  We had wasted years in hard work on endless tasks, and when we added it all up, as Albertine was forced to do every day, it came to nothing.  Less than nothing.  I had imagined that our work and our profits would buy the hotel for us.  I had imagined our growing old here, living in our rooms on the top floor for as long as we continued to run the hotel and then retiring to one of the little cottages at the water’s edge as permanent guests.  I had supposed that I would go on writing the Larry Peters books, my little stories for boys and girls my age, and they would bring the money we would need.  Another mistake: by refusing to introduce blood, gore, mayhem, and misery into the Larry Peters series, I had lost it. 
   I — I — I!  I suddenly realized that I had been using the wrong metaphors, the wrong metaphors entirely, and they had blinded me to the truth.  The buzzing swarm, the grains of sand — wrong.  They didn’t describe the problem.  Suddenly I saw the problem, saw it clearly, as if a gust of wind had cleared the air, blown the buzzing swarm and heaps of sand away.  It stood in front of me like a fat man in a narrow hallway.  No, no — like a fat man in a tunnel.  Yes.  A fat man blocking our way out of a cave.  Blocking our escape from the dank and dripping cave of our unhappiness, blocking the way to the light, to hope, to a future. 
   I began to feel better.  I wasn’t happy, but I felt better.  At least I knew who was to blame.  The man in the way.  Me.

Leaving Small’s Hotel affirms once more that when the destination is Babbington . . . “time spent in another place, in another life, is the perfect vacation, the ideal.”

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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