Honesty's Fool

He brought a copy of A Winter’s Tale. It was July 18th and, in the dead of night, it was still close to eighty-five degrees. When the central air in his apartment broke, his landlord told him it would take two to three days to fix. Being almost eighty-five himself, Ronald Dill might not have made it that long with the heat and, as they say in New England, the humidity. His landlord being a nice woman named Lisa who was very fond of her only tenant, she decided that she would put him up in a hotel across town until the issue was resolved. He was delighted. It would be something of a vacation, and he hadn’t taken a vacation in years. His last one was to visit his son in Austin, and despite what he thought was a lovely visit, he had not been invited back. His copy of Shakespeare’s play had a note written on the title page--

“What you do still betters what is done.”

Each decade of his life, he would pick a Shakespeare or two to study. Having done so, he now associated certain plays with certain eras of his life. His forties seemed defined by Hamlet and Twelfth Night. His fifties were colored by Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew. He chose A Winter’s Tale for his eighties, because it featured resurrection. Ronald Dill knew that old people weren’t meant to fear death. They were meant to welcome it, because life is obligated to give them wisdom in order to understand why it’s unnecessary to be afraid. They may also simply be tired of life and feel gratitude when it’s winding down. Ronald felt none of those things. Sitting on a soft but firm hotel bed wearing nothing but boxers and the complimentary robe, he looked out the broad window above the rarely-used writing desk.

The hotel was called Grace by the Bay. There was another Grace hotel in town, but that was Grace in the Sky, because it pierced the skyline of the city so prominently. He was appreciative to be staying at the Grace by the Bay, because, yes, there was a view of the bay. That is, there would be a view if not for a descended fog that cast the entire night into something like a Hammett novel. Ronald Dill wanted to take a photo with his phone, but what would be the point of photographing a fog? He once sent his son a photo of the bluest sky he’d ever seen in his life and received nothing but a thumbs up reaction. When the boy was little, he and his wife took Ronald Jr. on a vacation to a beach house in Delaware. When they got there, the place was infested with rats, and they checked into a hotel that was nearly as nice as the one he found himself in now. The hotel back then had prize-winning water pressure, and Ronald was convinced he could live to a hundred if he could take a proper shower once a day. It was hard to find good water pressure. On that vacation in Delaware, his son had taken a twenty-minute shower, and he had allowed it. It gave him and his wife time to discuss their divorce. They separated shortly after the trip. It was then that he felt a distance begin to grow between himself and the boy named after him. That distance never shortened over time; it only expanded.

Ronald got off the bed and made his way to the window. The fog seemed to be looking at Ron through the window from across a crowded room. It made him desire some kind of connection. A phone call. Nothing more. He thought about ordering room service just to have someone to talk to. How does a man make it to his eighties and there’s no one he can ring up when he needs to hear another voice? It would send him into a crisis if he had the energy for such a thing. These days a few pages in bed before passing out was a victory. Good prose used to vibrate him. Now, it was soporific. In his youth, Ronald was an actor, and a good one. He never played anything as illustrious as Broadway or London, but he was well-regarded in several large cities like Denver and Seattle. He once played Iago in Chicago, and there was talk of him making his way to LA. That was when, on a bit of an ego-high, he met a woman at a bar and the celebration led to a phone call shortly before an audition for a tv pilot. She had found the number at the studio he was renting until he landed his breakout role. He was going to be a father. Growing up Catholic, there were only so many choices in front of him. He made a call to the agent he’d only gotten the day before, flew home, and had a wedding at city hall the following week. His brother got him a job in the local post office. Every year or two for fun, he’d play a part in a community theater production. One year he played Harold Hill in The Music Man, and when he looked out at the seat in the front row he’d reserved for his wife and son, he saw that they were empty. He got home to find them both asleep on the couch. A Benny Hill marathon was playing on the television. He turned it off and then went up to bed. He never mentioned the show again.

The television in his room was quietly showing him that channel that every hotel has which explains where the pool is and what’s available at the breakfast buffet. Ronald looked at the bottom of the window and saw a small handle. He didn’t think they let you open the windows in hotels anymore just in case you were having a dour episode and got any wild ideas. Without hesitation, he cranked the handle and the window split open in the middle. Like water rushing into a sinking ship, the fog made its way into his room swiftly, but carefully. It opened his robe and kissed his hips. It turned over the blankets on the bed. It filled up the shower and the drain and the drain in the sink and each wastebasket and every drawer. It picked up Ronald’s copy of A Winter’s Tale and went looking for the part about the bear. Ronald felt a pursuit, but he didn’t know if he was chasing or being chased. The fog knocked the phone off the hook, but didn’t dial a single number.

It didn’t know who to call.