Bored to Death by Jonathan Ames

Author:Jonathan Ames
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Near a deli on Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth was a pay phone. It didn’t work. I walked a few blocks south and found one that did work. It had been years since I used a pay phone. I called 911 and reported a dead body in the Senton Hotel on Twenty-eighth Street, room sixty-three. The operator wanted my name and I hung up. I called 911 again, spoke to a different operator, and told that person the same thing and hung up. I wanted to make sure they got it right.

Fifteen minutes before those phone calls, I had been in his room, just staring at the body, terrified and disbelieving, but then I’d had the presence of mind to close the door and I got on the bed right next to him. I cursed myself for not knowing CPR. Do I pinch his nostrils and blow into his mouth? Do I pound on his chest? His eyes were open, but they were like the eyes of a doll. I felt his neck for a pulse, feeling the skin beneath the tattoo, which was some obscure Asian markings, and there wasn’t anything there, no pulse, no life. Then I put my head against his chest and I couldn’t hear anything. But I opened his lips, anyway, and held his nose shut—it’s what I had seen on TV—and I suppressed a scream of terror and blew air into him. I thought I might be sick. I did it for maybe twenty seconds and it had no effect. I pulled away. My first animal instinct had been correct—he was dead.

I staggered out of the room, sort of trembly and dizzy, but I walked down the six flights of stairs to get my head straight, and then went right out of the hotel, not handing in my key, not saying anything to my Indian pal. Just got out of there. Let him try to find Philip Marlowe.

After making the 911 calls and walking about twenty blocks in some kind of frenzied panic, spitting repeatedly to get the taste of the dead man out of my mouth, I hailed a cab to take me back to Brooklyn. In the car, I tried calling Lisa Weiss, hoping to end this nightmare and find the damn girl, but got the same fucking filled-up voice mail. I then tried calling Rachel Weiss, but she didn’t pick up and I left a message, saying she should call me right away, though I tried to keep my voice calm. When I spoke to her, I was going to tell her to have her parents call the police right away. But I have to say, this scared me. What kind of trouble could I get into for taking on this whole thing and then anonymously reporting a dead body? But it didn’t matter, I just had to get out of this mess.

I got home around twelve thirty and lay on top of my bed for hours, didn’t even take off my sport coat or shoes, just lay there, numb, waiting for Rachel to call, but she never did.

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