TOOK MY COFFEE to my workroom and shut the door.  Standing at the window, I reread the letter from Preston and Douglas announcing the cancellation of the Larry Peters series.  As I read, I had the oddest sensation that all the characters in the series, with whom I had become so familiar, were in their rooms in the big old Peters family house on Kittiwake Island, packing their bags, getting ready to leave, to go their separate ways, to part from one another forever.  I would miss them.  At the same time, though, I was disappointed in them.  They had let me down.  I had imagined that the Larry Peters books would go on forever, and I had expected Larry to provide a comfortable old age for Albertine and me.  He was supposed to be our retirement fund. 
   I let myself wallow in my misery for a while, and then I went for a long walk, round and round the rim of the island, walking in the shallow water, in my bare feet.  The bay was still warm, as warm as summer, though there was a chill in the morning air.  By the end of my walk, I had begun to hope again. Maybe the decision to cancel the series wasn’t irreversible.  Maybe Preston and Douglas were just testing me.  At our last meeting, when they had told me that they wanted to see the series “move in a new direction,” that they wanted “a touch of evil,” I had risen to my feet and said, dramatically, perhaps a touch too dramatically, my voice quaking, my hands shaking, “I remember a day long ago, when I was a child in a high chair gumming a piece of zwieback—” 
   “Peter,” said Preston, “this is neither the time nor the place for an extended reminiscence—” 
   “Damn it, Preston,” I said, striking my fist on the table, “hear me out!” 
   He shrugged and folded his arms across his chest and, to his credit, heard me out. 
   “A neighbor, a fussy, educated man named Dudley Beaker, was visiting, and he was talking to my mother, talking about me, without making any attempt to disguise what he was saying because he thought that I was too young to understand, and he told her—I’ll never forget it —that childhood is like a moment on a mountaintop in the sun, or maybe he said a moment in the sunshine on a mountaintop, before we descend into the vale of tears, or maybe it was the valley of death.  Well, I will not shove the kids who read my books off that mountaintop.  The world will do that to them soon enough.  It doesn’t need my help.  I won’t do it.” 
   I said that, and I meant it.  I seem to recall that I pounded my fist on the table a second time. 
   Douglas got up and came around the table and put a fatherly hand on my shoulder.  “You’ve got your principles, Peter, and we all admire that.  What you don’t have is much of an audience.  The kids are drifting away.  If you want them back, you’ve got to get some action in—” 
   “You don’t mean action, you mean violence.  You mean that I’ve got to start having people beaten up.  Battered.  Slashed.  Hacked.  Murdered.  You want to see blood.  You want to see rape, pillage, horror, and bleeding body parts—” 
   “Peter, we don’t want any of that,” said Preston.  “It’s the audience—” 
   “All we want is a series of books that will deliver a sizable audience,” said Douglas, “and if it takes a little action—” 
   “Violence,” I said. 
   “All right, violence, damn it!  If the kids want violence—” 
   “—then they’ll have to get it from another writer,” I said, and I got up and left. 
   I admit that it must have sounded like a firm, unalterable position at the time, but maybe it wasn’t too late to recant.  Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to capitulate.  Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to start giving them what they wanted. 
   I called.  I asked for Preston, but I got Douglas.  “Sandy,” I said, “listen—I was just wondering—is it too late for me to agree to a little murder and mayhem?  I’ve been thinking it over, and I think I’ve come up with some great ideas for death by amputation, evisceration, immolation, starvation, decapitation, defenestration—in other words, I think I’ve got some great ideas for capitulation.  What I was wondering is, would you be willing to revive the series if I killed somebody in each book?” 
   “Listen, Peter,” he said.  “I’m sorry, but it’s just not possible to resurrect the series. It’s laid to rest, behind us.  We’re really putting all our efforts into something new here now, night sweats.” 
   “What?” 
   “The Night Sweats series.  Each book puts the readers in a situation of confronting their worst nightmares, but in everyday life.” 
   “Kids?” 
   “Kids, sure.  We’ve got—let’s see—a kid who gets raped by his father, a kid who’s enslaved by a retired geezer who lives next door, a kid who ingests the seed pods of alien beings that sprout inside her and grow out of her orifices, stuff like that.  Scary stuff.  It’s showing a lot of promise. The focus group response has been just terrific.  Scares the shit out of the little bastards, but they eat it up, you know what I mean?  We’ve sold the screen rights to two of the books on plot outlines alone.  It’s something that I—that frankly I wish I could have gotten you in on, Peter—but—ah—you made yourself pretty clear about being, let’s say, against all that.” 
   “Yeah,” I muttered.  “I did.  I am.” 
   “But the kids love it.  I mean you could say this is kid-driven. We try the plots out on them and basically they keep saying, ëGimme more!  Scare me more!  Make me puke!’  It’s great!” 
   “Terrific,” I said. 
   “Hey, got to go,” he said.  “Good to hear from you.  Stay in touch.” 
   “You bet,” I said. 

I TRIED NOT TO BE GLOOMY during dinner, and I think I succeeded, but by reading time I was exhausted.  I felt old, finished.  Everything had come to nothing, that was the feeling.  There was just nothing.  I had nothing, and there was nothing to look forward to.  Whatever I had had, or done, or been had slipped away.  I had nothing.  I was nothing. I began the eighth episode of Dead Air, “Kap’n Klam, the Home of Happy Diners, the House of Hopes and Dreams,” without much enthusiasm.

“LET’S OFFER A BONUS,” she said when we were in bed, “payable to the individual realtor who sells the place.  Maybe it will get them to start bringing more people out here.” 
   “It’s only been five days,” I said, “and they’ve already brought one nutcase out to look at it.” 
   She gave me a look.  “The realtors like to say that it only takes one person, the right one, but if they’re not bringing lots of people out here we’re never going to see the right one, the one who is fool enough to actually buy the place.” 
   “Sure,” I said.  “Why not?  Offer a bonus.” 
   I didn’t mention the fact that in five days I had learned to look at the hotel with the eyes of a potential buyer.  When it first went on the market it looked quite good to me; I thought that I could see the work we had put into it, the money we had poured into it, the years of effort.  Now it looked like an old wreck in need of paint—shabby, tired, and weatherbeaten—and I was beginning to feel that no one would be fool enough to buy it. 

BALDY SAID, “Time for another entry in the Catalog of Human Misery, don’t you think, Bob?” 
   “Yeah.” 
   “Here’s one.  You’re sitting at the kitchen table waiting for your son to come home for dinner.  Got the picture, Bob?” 
   “Yeah.” 
   “Instead, there is a knock at the door.  It’s the cops.  You know what’s coming, don’t you, Bob?” 
   “Yeah.” 
   “You’re right.  Your son and four of his friends walked into a store—a convenience store, a bodega, a deli, any kind of store will do, right, Bob? 
   “Yeah.” 
   “Doesn’t matter what kind of store—and after they walked in they couldn’t think of anything better to do, so they decided to throw a scare into the owner, a person of a different race.  Any race will do, as long as it’s a different race, right, Bob?” 
   “Yeah.” 
   “They knew how to scare a shopkeeper, because they’d seen how it’s done.  They’d seen it on TV, and they’d seen it in the movies.  Be a gangster, be a tough, be a killer.  Talk the talk.  Walk the walk.  Exhibit the attitude.  They were only acting, just playing a part, but damn, they were good at it.  They were so good at it that the shopkeeper pulled his gun from under the counter and shot your son dead.  That’s entertainment!” 
   There was a long pause, and then he said, “Good night, boys and girls.  Stay in the cave.  It sucks outside, and the rain it raineth every day.” 

warm, engaging vignettes—gentle speculations on the way the imagination works and memory distorts, and on the way we build and manipulate our personal mythologies

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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