Free Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman Page B

Ryan.
    She signs the ledger as Eva Ryan. The penmanship is clear, precise; the E and the R ornate as if they had been written by a breeze blowing through ink.
    “Hello, Mr. Ryan.”
    I don’t know this man behind the counter smiling at me, but like so much else, it seems as if I should, so I nod to him and smile back. My clothes are wet. I am cold. My shoes are sandy. The man hands the lady a key and a bellboy takes our small bags, leading us to a flight of stairs and down a half-lit corridor to a room that opens to the ocean, the sliding glass door filled with dimming light and white-limned waves in the distance. The bellboy leaves the bags and closes the door. The lady goes into the bathroom and I sit on the bed, wet, the taste of wine on my lips. It is dusk. The room is almost dark and the ocean slips away, a retreating lull spooling back to a faraway time zone. The woman comes out wrapped only in a towel and the bathroom light behind her makes her a silhouette, a shadow.
    “Remember this room, James?”
    I do not.
    “We lived in this room for three months after Europe changed. You wrote your first book here. You hurried it. You made me read over your shoulder as you typed. The publisher wanted it quickly and this room was scattered with papers and pens and notes and room service trays and you wrote and wrote and the night you finished we ran to the beach with towels and a bottle of wine.”
    I do not. I do not. I do not. Remember.
    “I am Eva, James.”
    She steps toward me, takes off her towel, and pats my face with it. She bends and slips off my shoes and peels off my clothes and dries me. Slowly. My skin is damp and cold, like the chill off a marble floor, and the woman and I slip under the covers, and the sheets are cool and she pulls me to her, my marble skin on her warmth and we are still, and I think I must know this; there is a shred of memory somewhere, perhaps in a capillary, or a vein buried deep. I have known this before. I feel it in me, but it is like a possession stolen, lost, left on a windowsill.
    She takes my hand and then a finger and puts the finger on her forehead and moves it down her nose and over her lips and down her chin to her throat. I am tracing her, to her breasts and across her nipples. I feel her heartbeat and down I move; she’s guiding me, over her belly and across her hips. She whispers that I must know this. I must know the shape of her, yes, she says, her body has changed with time, but still I must know, the bones and her spirit, the same, unchanged. She pulls the covers back. She lies in the last light of the day and what I have traced is a painting in a museum, the pale white of her body, a filament, a mirror before me; she wants me to see myself in the flesh and bone of her love. That’s what she says. Love, in this bed, down a bellboy’s corridor along the sea. She kisses me, and I know her, maybe not all of her, not every line of history she tells me we have, but of all the words she has spoken, and I guess there must have been many, it is this kiss that makes me see the forgotten places. I kiss her back.
    “James?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you here?”
    “I think.”
    “Hang on to it. Don’t get lost again.”
    She kisses me and pulls me to her tight.
    “Eva, where have I been?”
    She doesn’t answer. She squeezes me, presses me against her. What’s real, her hair on the pillow, her lips on mine, is permanent, constant, as if I had gone to the bathroom in the night and returned to find things set right, her slumber, clothes draped over chairs, blankets and sheets riffled like the waves of the sea. This moment I know. Eva is Eva, but older. Perhaps I am writing a story, but where are we? All I know is this room and Eva. My notes, scribbled, disheveled, what do they say? I must go to the window, but Eva says no; the streets and alleys are quiet, there will be news tomorrow, but for now the news sleeps, the Havels and Walesas have returned to their vodkas and whispered