The Postcard — Bennett Sims

The client turned out to be an older man, a lawyer nearing retirement. 

I met him at his office downtown, where he gestured for me to sit across the desk from him, as though I were the client and his were the services we were there to discuss. 

After introducing himself he produced a manila envelope from a drawer and withdrew a postcard. 

The postcard showed an aerial photograph of a seaside highway: a two-lane road hugged a steep cliff, thickly forested with pine trees; on the shoreline below a gray sea stretched flat and featureless from a rocky strand. 

In the distance there was a dark bank of clouds, presaging storm. 

Heavy white fog clung to the tops of the pine trees, creeped along the beach. 

Printed at the top of the postcard, in the sunny yellow cursive and blocky font of a tourism bureau, utterly at odds with the bleakness of the tableau, were the words Meet Me In Ocean View! 

I gathered that Ocean View was the name of a resort town along this highway, though there were no road signs visible, and it was impossible to tell, from the photo alone, which direction along the highway Ocean View was likeliest to lie in. 

There was not only no town pictured in the photograph, but no visible person to meet there either: no smiling tourist, no car on the highway, not even a motel in the distance, in short no trace of human life. 

Only a deserted highway along a cold beach. 

Turn it over, the client said. 

I placed the postcard face down on the desk and saw that there was a handwritten message inked neatly on the back. 

Ocean View Motel, Room 315, S.H. 

It was postmarked last week, at Ocean View’s post office.

My wife and I visited Ocean View on our honeymoon, five decades ago now, the client explained. 

They had stayed for a weekend at the Ocean View Motel. 

When I did not respond he added, In Room 315. 

S.H. were his wife’s initials, of course, and he told me her name.

I asked him whether he believed his wife had sent him this postcard. 

He shook his head. 

My wife is dead, he said.

His wife had died last year, he explained, exactly one year to the day that the postcard had arrived. 

He went on to describe some of the symptoms of what he referred to only as her memory disease. 

Circular conversations, repetition, misrecognition, disorientation.

Strange loops.

I asked whether they had ever returned to the town or to the motel, either together or alone, perhaps for a vacation or an anniversary.

No, he said, without elaborating. 

He handed me a faded photograph.

The photograph featured a young man—recognizably my client, years ago, back when he had been close, I estimated, to my own age—posing with a young woman beside the motel’s road sign.

They had apparently just arrived, the evidence of a long drive—suitcases, groceries—visible in the car behind them.

In the background I could see the motel, a squat block of orange stucco, with turquoise trim. 

From the envelope, the client now produced a silver room key, attached to a green plastic tag in the shape of a diamond. 

Embossed in white was the room number: 315.

A memento, he said, we kept the spare.

He pushed the key across the table. 

Keep it, he told me, take it with you, it may prove useful. 

I asked what he wanted me to do.

Go to Ocean View—the motel still exists, he said, after all these years—and see who is staying there, who sent this postcard, and why, see who, if anyone, is renting room 315, what they want from me. 

He had tried calling, but no one answered.

I told him that it was probably a prank and asked whether there was anyone he could think of who would wish him ill, anyone with enough knowledge of his marriage and their honeymoon to have sent this postcard, anyone his wife might have told about Ocean View, for instance any children or lovers, I suggested.

He shook his head.

I’ve thought of all that, he said, there’s no one she could have told, even she would have forgotten the honeymoon in the end. 

She had spent her last years in a mental fog, he explained, in a facility, on bad days she barely recognized him, even after he reminded her of who he was she would forget. 

He stared out his office window.

Every few minutes, he went on, she would look back at him brightly, as if he had just walked into the room, asking who he was, what he was doing there, as if they hadn’t been talking the entire time, every instant she saw him was like the first time she had ever seen him.

The last time he visited she had been with another man in the facility, a fellow resident, whom she had introduced to him as her husband: Thank you for visiting, she had told him, I want you to meet my husband, before gesturing to the blankly smiling stranger beside her.

After this he could not bear to see her, it had been a year since he had visited or even called by the time she died.

So you see, he concluded, she would never have been able to recall the name of the town, much less the motel, much less the room number. 

I asked him what else he remembered from their honeymoon, anywhere they might have gone in town, no matter how insignificant, any memory might be helpful to me.

He thought a moment and said they did take a tour of some kind of factory there, he could no longer recall what or where exactly, just the dim memory of iron machinery, vast rooms, a slow afternoon listening to the droning of a docent.

He had not thought of that afternoon in years, he said, not until I had asked.

He pushed his business card across the desk, with his private number on it.

He would pay my daily rate plus expenses, he told me, for as long as it took.

Let me know as soon as you find anything, he said.

I flew to the nearest airport, in the town of N—, little more than a landing strip in the woods, and rented a car there, an anonymous black sedan.

Ocean View was half a day’s drive.

I entered the motel’s address in the GPS and listened to the cool robotic voice as it guided me toward my destination.

Proceed to the route, it commanded.

You will arrive at…Ocean View Motel…in five hours and fifteen minutes.

I called the client once from the road, but he did not answer.

Otherwise I drove in silence, the hours melting past in a trance broken only by the intermittent instructions of the GPS device, which commanded me in an unvarying second-person address, the mood of hypnotic suggestion, of mesmerism.

Turn right, merge left, you will arrive.

I thought of my client visiting his wife in the facility, trying to communicate with her in this same calm, compassionate monotone, commanding her to remember.

You are my wife, I am your husband.

Guiding her into the present.

The route that the device had chosen for me followed a single scenic highway for several hundred miles, a curving two-lane road that wound along the ocean on my right.

I kept glancing out the window expectantly, waiting to recognize the stretch of coastline from the postcard.

Soon, I thought, I would enter the image. 

And then, without my noticing when it had happened, the landscape had become familiar to me.

To my right I saw the bleak beach of gray rocks, a dark bank of clouds far out over the water, and for a moment I had the distinct impression that I had been there before.

It was the same strand from the postcard.

I had crossed over that border that separates what is familiar from what is strange, I had trespassed into the terrain or the district of déjà vu. 

The beach was just as deserted in reality as in the photograph, and just as foggy too. 

At some point thick white wisps had begun to billow over my windshield, and the closer I approached to Ocean View, the denser the fog became.

I even had to turn on my high-beams, though it was the middle of the day. 

The headlights penetrated only a few feet in front of me, and I could see ahead by just a single lane divider at a time. 

One yellow line after another blurred beneath the hood of my car.

No sooner had one line vanished into the fog behind me than another materialized from out of the fog before me, yellow link following yellow link, I thought, in a chain of instants.

Welcome to Ocean View, a passing billboard flashed, before sinking into the mist in my rearview mirror.

The destination is on your left, the robotic voice announced.

I slowed in time to see the dim outline of the Ocean View Motel, just visible through the fog roiling against my passenger window.

I pulled into the lot, parked near the entrance.

Mine was the only car in sight.

Were it not for the wan light in the windows of the lobby, I would have assumed that the motel had long gone out of business. 

You have arrived, the voice announced.

I checked the client’s photograph to compare.

Like the beach, the building was identical to its image. 

Nothing had changed in the intervening decades, not the orange paint of the stucco nor the turquoise trim, it was a structure untouched by time. 

Even the roadside sign appeared to be the same: instead of a light box atop a tall metal highway pole—ubiquitous among modern hotel chains—there was the same modest wooden vintage billboard that my client and his wife had posed beside in his photograph, still staked into the grass of the road verge, with the words Ocean View freshly painted in turquoise cursive.

The building stood exactly as my client would have remembered it.

If he had been the one to return here, it no doubt would have felt like reentering a memory. 

And perhaps, it occurred to me, that was why he had sent me in his place.

I had not thought to wonder before that moment why he had hired me, rather than coming here himself.

I had assumed he feared some danger waiting for him on the other side of the postcard, blackmail or a trap, but perhaps he simply preferred not to revisit or remember Ocean View, now that his wife was gone, he had not specified, after all, whether his memory of the honeymoon was a happy one, nor for that matter his memory of his marriage. 

These were the kinds of questions I was paid not to ask, it was safest to assume that my clients were unhappy—adulterers, stalkers, divorcers—if you hired me at all it was because you belonged to the race of the betrayers and the betrayed.

When I entered the lobby there was no one at the front desk.

I rang the silver bell on the counter and waited for what felt like several minutes before crossing the lobby to investigate a wire rack of postcards in the corner. 

There was the same Meet Me In Ocean View! postcard that my client had received, as well as a postcard featuring white sails luffing across the foggy water, and—this was the image I lingered over—a postcard featuring a strange brick building, immense and narrowly windowed, fronted by an iron gate and flanked by what seemed to be two large smokestacks. 

This must be the factory my client had visited, a relic—I found myself imagining—of Ocean View’s industrial past, not photogenic as architecture but somehow historically significant, possibly a museum now.

As for what the factory might have produced, I could not imagine, maybe its twin smokestacks manufactured all of Ocean View’s fog.

May I help you, a voice called.

At the front desk an older woman had appeared, probably the same age as my client and his wife, she could even have been working here the weekend that they came, all those years ago, perhaps she was the one who had taken their photo.

I told her I would like to book a room for the weekend.

She asked whether I preferred smoking or nonsmoking, and I replied that my only preference was that I stay in room 315.

She regarded me then for the first time—the request had surprised her—but she did not question me.

I’m sorry, she said, that room is occupied.

She asked, again, whether I would prefer smoking or nonsmoking.

I told her my only preference was to stay on the third floor, and that if 315 was unavailable, then 313 would suffice.

Then I thought to ask whether room 315 might be available soon.

I had prepared a story if she asked—that it had been the site of my honeymoon, a source of fond memories, nostalgia—but she did not ask.

She regarded me again and simply told me no, she did not know when the current occupant planned to check out.

I thanked her and said that in that case I would be happy to take 313.

She smiled for the first time—as though suddenly remembering our roles as clerk and customer—and asked whether I took a smoking or nonsmoking room.

Either is fine, I reminded her, whatever 313 happened to be.

That’s right, she said apologetically, you told me that already. 

313 was nonsmoking, she explained, but I could smoke in the parking lot out back.

She gave me a contract to fill out, and when I reached the signature line I hesitated at the thought of signing my client’s name. 

I always assumed my clients’ names.

But I remembered the blankly smiling man my client had told me about, the fellow patient whom S.H. had introduced to him as himself—meet my husband, she had told him—the last time he had visited her. 

This stranger, too, had assumed his name, or at least his identity, and how many of us could fit, I wondered, inside one man’s name, before I signed that name on the dotted line and handed the contract back to the woman.

She looked at it a moment, suspiciously I thought, then put it away, presenting me with a white plastic keycard for my room. 

She noted my surprise at the card—I had been expecting a vintage silver key like my client’s, I still had it in my pocket—and she asked whether I had any other questions.

I produced the client’s postcard from my suitcase and slid it across the desk.

I explained that a friend had mailed it to me, did she remember selling it to anyone in recent weeks?

She frowned at the postcard, as though straining to read a difficult passage.

I can’t remember, she said finally, we sell so many of these.

I found this hard to credit but did not contradict her, I placed the postcard back in my suitcase.

Would you like to buy one, she asked.

I had not intended to, but as soon as she had put the question to me, the idea struck me with a certain force.

I returned to the rack and selected a postcard, not of the beach, but of the factory.

Setting it on the counter, I asked whether she knew what this building was, where in town I might find it, I would like to visit it while I was here, I said.

As she had with the previous postcard, she frowned at this one in silence, her eyes bright with what seemed to me a test-taker’s anxiety, as though her brain had gone blank, foggy with the fear of producing a wrong answer. 

Eventually she said, Oh, it’s the hospital.

A hospital?

I studied the postcard again, and yes, it was true: the two structures that I had at first taken to be smokestacks were—I could see it now—in fact just slightly taller towers, composed of the same red brick as the main building, like separate wings flanking a general ward.

Though there were no ambulances or medical insignia visible, it was plain that the building was a hospital, I even wondered at myself for having mistaken it for a factory in the first place. 

My understanding of the building shifted totally in that instant, I could no longer even see the towers as smokestacks, so clearly had their tower-being risen to the surface of the image, it was like watching a photograph develop in a chemical tray.   

Yes, of course, I said, the hospital, do you know where it is?

She began to shake her head, but when she saw that I was still watching her expectantly, a worried expression crossed her face, and I could tell she felt a pressure to tell me something, anything, to summon some memory for my benefit.

That’s right, she said, I remember now, it’s just outside of town, about a mile.

Thanking her, I paid for the postcard and headed upstairs.

My room was next to 315, as I had hoped.

Setting my suitcase down in the hall, I examined the door to 315.

No light was visible under the threshold, and a Do Not Disturb tag hung from the knob.

I knocked firmly, but inside nothing stirred.

Turning to my own room, I waved the white keycard over the reader, a bulky black box that whirred complexly before flashing a green light.

I had been prepared for this modern touch, but once inside I was surprised to find how much the room itself had been renovated, outfitted with the same contemporary amenities as any hotel: a flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the bed; an automatic coffee maker beside the coat closet in the vestibule; a charging hub on the nightstand, with ports for several devices. 

The vintage façade belied this modern interior, which left an odd aftertaste of anachronism, as though the present had taken up residence in the shell of the past.

I called the client, who did not answer. 

I left a voice message explaining that I had arrived at the motel and rented a room neighboring 315. 

I would identify its occupant soon, I assured him, and send photos.

Against my bedroom’s one window, there was a desk overlooking the parking lot and, beyond it, the beach.

I placed my client’s photograph in the desk drawer, took a seat at the window.

My rental was still the only car in the lot. 

It was seeming more and more likely that the two of us—315 and I—were the sole guests in the building.

I tried to imagine who would rent a room here, at this vacant motel in this desolate town, and wait a week for my client to meet them.

They had signed the postcard with his wife’s name, to convince him that he was receiving this message from a ghost, or from a memory. 

But they had not signed her name, I corrected myself, only her initials, as though to preserve some privacy on this public correspondence: it was a signature that erased her identity as soon as it engraved it, the initials invited every other S.H. to occupy and overlay her name.

The subtext of the postcard was, Do you remember this place, I remember this place.

The letter writer remembered everything that his wife—in her final years—would have forgotten, and they were determined to make my client remember as well.

The message had arrived from beyond the end to return my client to the beginning.

A ghost, too, is a kind of memory disease.

The ghost has forgotten that it is dead, or the world has forgotten that it is gone, the ghost returns to reality the way that a mind returns to the past.

That appeared to be the only purpose of this poison-pen postcard campaign. 

It was not a threat or blackmail, the letter writer was not making any demands or naming any ransom, they were merely reminding my client of a time in his life that, it seemed, he would prefer to forget. 

But 315 had not written a letter, I corrected myself.

A postcard is not a letter, and they had chosen to send a postcard specifically, many things distinguish a postcard from a letter.

The lack of an envelope, the flatness, the photograph.

What distinguishes the postcard most of all, I thought, is the impossibility of response.

The postcard arrives with no return address, from a destination that the sender has already left. 

The message of every postcard, no matter what is written on it, is I wish you were here.

The sender calls out to an absent receiver from some present site, but by the time the postcard arrives, the sender will no longer be there, they will be absent themselves, the here will have become there in their memories, emptied of presence and become past.

As I write this, I wish it were the case that you were here, but also, When you read this, I will be wishing that you had been there.

The here always flickering between present and past, presence and absence.

Every postcard is the expression of this paradoxical desire.

Every one-way communication is, de facto, a postcard, every message to or from the dead: when my client visited his wife in the facility, he came to her as a postcard, the message You are my wife or I am your husband meant simply I wish you were here.

A ghost, too, is a kind of postcard. 

315 had sent my client the postcard because they wished he was here, but he had disobeyed, had sent me here instead, I was the envoy he had dispatched in his place, his riposte, his postcard, whatever message they were planning to deliver to him would devolve to me.

As their initial invitation had devolved to me.

The devolution itself is what distinguishes the postcard: a postcard never has just one reader, after all; anyone can read what is written there, can become its addressee or its destination, every postcard is addressed to all possible yous.

These were the thoughts that I turned over in my mind, as I sat by the window.

As I kept vigil over the parking lot, waiting for 315 to return.

Long after night had fallen the parking lot was still empty.

I remained at the desk, watching headlights glide by the motel on the highway. 

Occasionally a dark car slowed, as if about to pull in, but it always sped past in the end.

I began to wonder whether 315 could have been spooked by the sight of my car. 

They would have been expecting my client to arrive, and they would be on the lookout for unfamiliar vehicles.

In any other motel, a motel with any other guests, this might not have been a concern, but here the presence of even a single car was conspicuous. 

I remembered what the desk clerk had said, about a rear parking lot, and it occurred to me—several hours too late—that I should have moved my car out of sight. 

I took my keys and headed downstairs.

On my way out of the building I noted the empty hallways, the abandoned front desk. 

Truly there was no one else here.

In the parking lot I approached my car quietly, unlocking the door with the key rather than using the electronic fob, to avoid an errant beep.

But once I had slid into the driver’s seat and placed the key in the ignition, a loud voice called out to me from inside the car. 

You have arrived, the voice announced.

I startled, wheeling around to the empty back seat.

You have arrived, the voice repeated. 

Smiling at my nerves, I reached up to the GPS device below the rearview mirror. 

It was still on, I had forgotten to turn it off, it was finishing its script from earlier that day, from a drive that already felt like a week ago, it was stuck reciting these dead directions from the past. 

I turned it off and pulled the car around back. 

The rear lot was equally empty, and I made sure to park out of sight of the highway.

Back in my room, I tried to resume my vigil at the window, but the exhaustion from the flight and the drive had caught up with me.

Falling into bed, I entered without transition into a strange dream of a hospital.

When I woke the next morning, there were no new messages from my client.

Out the window, the front parking lot was still empty.

But when I checked the hallway, I saw that the Do Not Disturb tag had been removed from 315’s door.

I tried knocking again, and no one answered.

Could they have left already?

It was possible they had come back in the night, after I had fallen asleep, and that they had left again early this morning, before I woke. 

I hurried downstairs and found the front desk deserted as usual.

In the rear lot, mine was still the only car.

Maybe they had merely gone into town, I told myself, as I climbed into the driver’s seat.

I would begin with the post office, I decided, it was possible that someone there would remember 315, or that 315 would be there themselves, monitoring a post-office box for my client’s response.

I typed the address into the GPS and pulled out onto the highway.

Turn right, the cool robotic voice commanded. 

In fifty feet, turn left.

It was another foggy day, I could not see five feet ahead of me, much less fifty. 

The commands came minutes before I could see the intersections where I was supposed to carry them out.

I simply had to trust that there would eventually be a street to turn left onto.

I felt like a sleepwalker, a sleep-driver, blindly obeying an intelligence alien to my own.

I switched on my left turn signal, and sure enough, within seconds, a stop sign materialized out of the fog, out of the future.

Turning left, I soon found myself in what appeared to be downtown Ocean View, drifting down a main street of single-story shops. 

A standard beach town, remarkable only for its mist and emptiness.

All the shop-windows were dark, the stores all closed.

There were no pedestrians on the sidewalks, and in the streets the parked cars had the distinct air of having been abandoned there.

I knew that it was the off-season, but even so the atmosphere of desertion unnerved me. 

Moving block by block down the main street, I looked left and right for any signs of life. 

Any of the parked cars could be 315’s.

You have arrived, the voice announced.

And it was true, the post office had materialized on my left.

I pulled into the parking lot, but the building was dark as well, closed like everything else.

I coasted a slow circle in the empty lot, then entered the hospital’s address into the GPS.

According to the map it lay directly ahead, a mile outside of town, just as the desk clerk had said.

But as I returned to the main street I could see no hospital in the distance, only a curtain of fog that never seemed to recede as I approached it.

Turn left, the GPS commanded eventually, and I switched on my blinker without thinking.  

As I turned onto the next side street, I felt a physical twinge of lostness, like the tug of a compass needle in my chest, I knew at once that I was headed in the wrong direction.

But when I checked the GPS map the car’s icon was still proceeding down the blue line of its designated route.

Turn left, the voice commanded again, and again I obeyed, switching on my blinker at the next stop sign. 

I pulled onto another side street, a narrow alley lined with shabby condominiums: timeshares, I imagined, left vacant until summer, not a single person stood on the balconies.

With mounting disorientation I drove deeper into the fog.

Turn left, the GPS commanded again, for the third time.

I knew that this could not be correct—this was a residential neighborhood, I was being led farther and farther afield from the hospital—but I did not know why the GPS would keep sending me down this labyrinth of left turns.

Maybe there was a road closure, construction, maybe this was an elaborate detour.

Or maybe the GPS had encountered a glitch in its script.

Maybe it had become caught in a repetition, mechanically reiterating the same line.

Turn left, turn left, turn left.

Turning left at the next stop sign, I realized what must have happened. 

The GPS must be guiding me back to the post office, I thought, sending me to my starting point. 

I must have forgotten to update my destination in the address bar, and now I was trapped traveling in a loop.

Turn left, the voice commanded again, confirming my suspicions.

You have arrived.

I pulled to a stop and squinted through the foggy windshield. 

But looming ahead of me, instead of the post office, was the unmistakable façade of the hospital: an immense brick building fronted by an iron gate. 

Framed through the windshield, the hospital looked just as it had in the postcard, the entry gate was even centered in the same point in my field of vision. 

It was as if I had come to a stop on the exact spot where the photographer had stood, occupying the vantage point or subject position of the camera. 

The only difference now was the mist, which obscured everything except the two side towers, jutting just barely above the roof of fog.  

As the fog drifted off, it seemed to pour forth from the towers in clouds, like smoke from smokestacks. 

All the narrow windows in the building’s façade were dark, apparently even the hospital was closed in this town.

Stepping out of the car, I approached the gate.

It was chained shut, with a heavy padlock on the chains, they had all begun to rust in the salt air, the hospital must have been shuttered for years.

Studying the façade, I pictured my client and S.H. inside, taking their tour of the factory.

I tried to imagine what my client would remember, if he were the one standing here now, with my eyes closed I summoned an image of myself with S.H., wandering the halls of the building before me: the iron machinery, the vast rooms, the droning of the docent.

When I returned to the car I entered the motel’s address into the GPS again, reviewing the directions carefully before proceeding to the route.

Turn left, the voice commanded.

Both parking lots were still empty when I arrived, and this time I did not bother parking out back.

315 must have checked out of the motel as soon as they had seen my car, they could be miles away by now, I would have to call the client and tell him that I had botched the case.

Inside the lobby, the same woman was stationed at the desk, sitting in the same position I had seen her in yesterday.

How may I help you, she asked.

I asked whether room 315 was available.

Ignoring my request, she smiled and asked whether I preferred smoking or nonsmoking.

I reminded her that I already had a room, 313, and as proof I flashed my white keycard, somewhat uselessly, there was no room number printed on it.

That’s right, she said apologetically, I remember now, I’m sorry.

I would be happy to move to room 315, I told her, if it was available.

She closed her eyes, searching her memory.

I think someone is staying there, she said uncertainly. 

I thanked her for her help and turned to leave. 

But I hesitated at the desk, showing her my copy of the hospital postcard again.

I asked whether she knew anything about the hospital, or whether she had any brochures.

She studied the postcard and murmured, Hospital?

I had bought the postcard yesterday to send to my friend, I reminded her, and when I visited the hospital that morning it had appeared to be closed.

I don’t know about that, she said, tapping the postcard, but this is the prison.

I studied the image again, more closely this time, and now that she had said it, yes, I could see it, leaning in I could make out minute but—once I had noticed them—unmistakable details that until that moment I had missed: the vertical bars in all the narrow windows; the glass glinting atop both towers, likely lookout stations for the guards; a thin vine of barbed wire looping around the gate.

Strange, I thought, how much it resembled the building I had visited today.

The main ward, the two towers.

I was certain it was a hospital that I had visited, for I had seen the word hospital on the GPS map.

But the two buildings were identical.

Perhaps the same building had, at separate times, served both functions: first it had been a prison and then it had become a hospital, a prison in the past and a hospital in the present, or vice versa, and perhaps now the city maintained a museum exhibit somewhere of all of the building’s guises—factory, prison, hospital—with postcards showing historical photographs of its various façades.  

I asked the woman whether one could visit the prison, and she smiled.

Oh yes, she said, it’s just outside of town.

Back upstairs, I saw that the Do Not Disturb tag had been restored to 315’s doorknob. 

I was surprised by the deepness of my relief.

They were still here, I had not lost them.

I knocked at their door, listening, but there was only silence.

Placing the prison postcard facedown against the wall, I wrote a message for them—Ocean View, Room 313—and signed it, I could not say why, with my client’s initials. 

I knelt to slide the card under their door, and as I was rising, something caught my eye.

Just below the handle of the doorknob was a keyhole.

In their transition from metal keys to plastic cards, the motel had installed the bulky black readers above the doorknobs, but they had not taken the additional step, it appeared, of removing the original keyholes.

I reached into my pocket and removed my client’s key, the memento from his honeymoon.

With no expectation of success, I eased the key into the hole. 

It still fit.

Checking the hall on either side, I gently rotated it until I heard the click of the latch.

The door swung open and I slipped inside, stepping around my postcard on the carpet.

Housekeeping, I called out in a false voice, and no one responded.

The room was empty.

It was, as I expected, laid out identically to my own.

The same coffee maker and coat closet in the vestibule, the same flat-screen TV opposite the bed, the same desk against the window.

A paper coffee cup sat on the desk, where the occupant of 315 must have been keeping their own vigil over the parking lot, waiting for my client to arrive, though the curtains were now closed.

I withdrew my phone and took a series of quick snapshots.

I opened the drawers of the nightstand, rifled through the wastebasket, looking for an ID or even a credit-card receipt, any piece of paper that would bear their name, but there was nothing, the room was bare of any trace except the paper cup.

Finally, opening the desk drawer, I found a copy of my client’s photograph, the same image of him and S.H. posing beside the Ocean View road sign.

The sight of it there startled me at first, it didn’t occur to me that 315 would have their own copy, for a moment I was gripped by a vision of them breaking into my room while I was gone, or while I slept, stealing the photo from my desk drawer.

I raised my phone and took a snapshot of the photo, maybe my client would know what to make of it, or who else would have a copy.

I walked to the window, tempted to draw the curtains.

If I drew them now, I knew, I ran the risk of being spotted. 

Once 315 returned, they would have only to glance up at their window from the parking lot to see—by the parted curtains—that someone had trespassed into their room. 

On the other hand, I reflected, if I left the curtains closed, I ran an even graver risk, for I would have no warning when they arrived.

They could be pulling into the parking lot at any moment—even now—without my knowledge. 

After deliberating for what felt like minutes, I threw the curtains aside, and froze in place—with the reflexive paralysis of prey—when I saw a second car parked beside my own.

It was a black sedan indistinguishable from mine, it was clear—even from this distance—that it was the same make and model. 

I lifted my phone to the window, quickly pinching the touch screen to zoom in on the license plate, and snapped a picture.

The car was empty, and the driver was nowhere to be seen in the lot; they must have already entered the building, must be making their way back to their room. 

It was time to leave.

I hastily drew the curtains closed and started for the door, but I was not halfway across the room when I heard the whirring of the card reader, saw the knob turning.

Casting a panicked glance around me, I spotted the coat closet in the vestibule, its door ajar. 

I ducked inside, easing the door shut just as the front door was opening.

The closet’s door was louvered, and when the light switched on, the lamp’s rays fell through the wooden slats in yellow lines, palely striping my hands.

I stepped back from the slats, withdrawing into the shadowed recesses of the clothes rack, and held my breath.

I readied the camera on my phone, prepared to snap a photo of 315 the moment that they passed into view before the slats.

As I waited, I tried to imagine their face, but I could picture only my client in his office, the young man in the photograph, S.H.

No one passed before the slats.

After the front door closed, there was a prolonged silence.

They seemed to be pausing at the threshold, as though surveying the room for disturbances.

What were they waiting for?

I cast my mind back, struggling to remember whether I had left any evidence, any traces of my presence there. 

Then I heard a rustle like fabric against the carpet, and I formed a distinct mental image of someone kneeling to the floor. 

The postcard.

Many moments passed, they must have been puzzling over the message I had left them—the message my client had left them, I corrected myself, I had signed it with his initials—until at last I heard the door open again and close behind them. 

Through the thin plaster of the closet’s back wall, the wall it shared with my own room’s vestibule, I heard them knocking sharply at my door.

They knocked three times in succession, with increasing force, the hollow sound of it filled the closet, and as they waited in vain for me to answer, I waited in fear for them to return to their room.

They did not return.

Their footsteps softened down the hallway, followed by the sound of the stairwell’s heavy metal door swinging shut.

They must be returning to the lobby, I realized, where they would attempt to interrogate the woman at the front desk about me.

Who bought this postcard, they would ask.

They would subject her to the same battery of questions that I had, I imagined, and her answers to them would prove just as useful.

Smoking or a nonsmoking, she would ask them.

Would you like to purchase a postcard?

Eventually they would reach the limits of their patience and leave, returning to their room.

I slipped free from the closet—leaving the door ajar as I had found it—and hurried back to my room, which I double-locked for good measure, drawing the chain across the bolt.

I went to the desk and checked the drawer: the photograph was still there, and nothing else had been disturbed.

It was only when I was sitting down, dialing my client, that I realized my error.

I had left the closet door ajar as I had found it. 

But that was not how they had found it.

When they had stepped into the vestibule a moment ago, the closet door had been closed, because I had been hiding inside it.

Now, when they returned, they would see the door ajar.

Whether or not they registered this discrepancy, they would be able to detect that something in the room was off, that something had changed between their memory of the room and the room itself, and they would sense by this change that I had been there.

Moments later I heard them return.

No sooner had they entered their room than I heard the door slam shut again.

It had not taken them long to notice the closet, not long at all.

There came a harsh knock at my door.

There was no point hiding from them.

They had no proof that I was the one who had broken into their room, and even if they did, there was no danger now in answering the door.

After all, wasn’t that what I had been sent here for? 

To confront them and to confirm their identity, to determine—if I could—what they wanted from my client?

He was not paying me to hide from them and hold my breath.

And yet I felt a powerful reluctance to answer the door.

When I finally rose from the desk, I noticed a postcard being slipped across the threshold, I called out to them to wait but they did not answer.

I did not hear their footsteps pattering down the hall, or the clanging of the stairwell door, but by the stillness in the room—in the entire building, it seemed—I could tell that they were gone.

I picked up the postcard.

They had bought a copy of the same factory/hospital/prison, and on the back they had left a message.

Meet me at the facility, room 315, S.H.

Facility?

This had been my client’s term for S.H.’s final dwelling place, where he had left her to spend her last days alone.

Is this what 315 meant by facility?

Were they inviting me—or my client, I corrected myself—to leave Ocean View altogether, to meet them at the same facility where he had betrayed S.H. by abandoning her? 

Or were they inviting him to meet them at the building on the postcard, which I had taken to thinking of as a factory/hospital/prison, but which they were now referring to as the facility?

A prison or a hospital could be described as a facility. 

315 had never seen my face, I had been careful, they must assume that my client was the one staying in the room beside them.

As far as they knew, he had obeyed their postcard and followed them here, and now they wanted him to follow them further, back to the same building where he had taken his tour with S.H., all those years ago, this was the next step in their plan or their punishment for him.

This postcard was meant for him, not for me, the facility had nothing to do with me, its brick façade was addressed to him, to his memory, I wish you were here.

Only one thing troubled me, why were they still bothering to sign their postcards S.H.?

Truly they must want him to believe he was being haunted.

Because he had stopped visiting his wife in life, she would visit him in death, or make him visit her in death, this must be what they wanted him to believe.

I was growing tired of their game.

S.H. had no ghost, and even if she did, it would not return here, S.H. had forgotten Ocean View herself, in the end.

A ghost is the ongoingness of a memory, it stays behind on behalf of what it recalls, what it cannot forget, unfinished business, whereas a mind with no memory must produce no ghost, its business has been finished by forgetfulness.

Even if S.H.’s ghost had remained to haunt the facility, Ocean View would mean nothing to it, the name would not recall this town, this motel, their honeymoon, much less the room number 315, the words Ocean View would conjure only blankness in the ghost’s eyes, its mind.

A ghost with gaps.

Even my client would mean nothing to it, it would not haunt him because it would not know him.

I am your husband, he would have to remind it, you are my wife. 

It was likelier to haunt the wrong man, I thought, mistaking some stranger for its husband, than to recognize my client himself.

Returning to my desk, I looked out the window just in time to see 315’s black sedan leaving the lot.

It turned onto the highway in the direction of Ocean View, and within seconds it was swallowed up by fog.

Opening my phone to the photo of their license plate, I ran the tag through a search and confirmed—I had suspected as much—that the car was a rental like my own, indeed that it was registered with the very same rental company, it probably came equipped with the same GPS device.

This was to be expected: the company operated the only rental booth at the only regional airport within a day’s drive, anyone flying to N— would end up with a car from their fleet.

Still the coincidence disturbed me.

The fact that 315 and I had disembarked at the same airport, had rented the same car from the same company, had been guided through the fog by the same voice, had been sitting room by room in the same motel, with the same photograph in the same desk drawer, seemed meaningful.

I sent the snapshots of 315’s room, the photograph, and the latest postcard to my client, and asked whether he knew what to make of them. 

He did not respond.

There was nothing left to do but follow after them.

I took my time gathering my things. 

There was no rush, I reasoned. 

If they wished my client was there, they would be waiting.

Turn left, the voice commanded.

There were still no other cars on the road.

The fog was thicker than ever, through the gaps that appeared in my windshield I barely recognized the highway, the beach, I was totally reliant on this voice.

I tried calling my client again, but his phone went to voicemail.

I began to leave a message updating him on the investigation, but midway through my explanation, I trailed off.

Why was I leaving a message in the first place?

Turn left, the voice commanded.

Why had my client not answered the phone, or called me back, or responded to my messages—even once—since I had arrived in Ocean View?

Many explanations occurred to me.

Maybe he had disappeared. 

Maybe he had hired me only to create a diversion, or an alibi.

Perhaps he had been the one to mail himself the postcard to begin with, for all I knew he could be the one staying in 315.

Or maybe he really did believe that S.H. was haunting him, and he had sent me here as a decoy, a substitute husband for her to haunt instead. 

If she could not remember him anyway, he must have thought, then why should he be the one to return to her, any other man could step just as well into his name, his place, his fate, why not send a stranger, why not me.

Turn left, the voice repeated. 

Yellow lines flashed out of the fog.

The farther I drove from the motel, the more distant a concern my client became.

He would never answer or call me back, I knew.

I had no expectation of seeing him again, which meant that the case was my own now, if I persisted in following 315 it could be only for my own reasons.

Turn left.

I was the one who wanted to know their identity, not my client, I was the one who their postcards—in a manner of speaking—had been addressed to.

I was their postcards’ destination, the one who was destined to return, drawn to the here toward which they wished me.

It was not too late to turn back, I thought.

The fog pressed against my car from all sides.

You could drive to N—, I told myself, to the airport, and leave Ocean View behind.

You have arrived, the voice announced.

Obeying, I slowed, and the brick building loomed above the fog looming before me.

The front gate was open now, and in the lot a single car—315’s black sedan, the double of my own—was parked near the entrance.

The building still resembled a hospital—on the GPS map it was still marked hospital—but staring at it I could not shake the faint penitentiary afterimage that overlaid it.

The building itself looked just as abandoned as before, all the windows dark, and while I could not see I could well imagine the bars in the windows.

I parked beside 315’s car.

You don’t have to go inside, I thought, as I exited my car and approached the building.

You can still turn back, I told myself, as I tested the front door.

It was unlocked, swinging open when I pushed, and I realized that I was wrong, there was no turning back now.

Indeed, as I stepped over the threshold, I understood that this was only a false threshold, I must have crossed the true threshold long before: even on the day I had driven into Ocean View there had been no turning back, every yellow highway line had flashed the fresh threshold of my trespass.

Inside the building, the lobby was dusty and dim: a desk, a floor of institutional linoleum, a barren wire rack where brochures might once have been, or postcards.

There were two stairwells to choose between, a door on my right and a door on my left, each leading to one of the towers that flanked the main building. 

There were no indications that 315 had gone through one or the other, I had no way of deciding between them. 

Just as I was about to turn right, a loud voice called out in the lobby, a disembodied robotic voice, resounding in the space as if from a hidden speaker.

Turn left, the voice commanded.

I scanned the ceilings for the source of the voice, but there was nothing to be seen.

Turn left, the voice commanded again.

I obeyed, heading up the lefthand stairwell.

On the third floor I proceeded down a long and narrow hallway.

The doors to either side of me—306, 313—were all closed, their thresholds dark. 

At 315 I saw a sliver of yellow light pouring out from beneath the sill.

I tried the knob, but it was locked, and when I knocked, no one answered.

I almost turned to leave, but then I thought to withdraw the Ocean View motel key from my pocket.

315, the diamond tag read.

It fit perfectly in the lock.

I turned the key to the left, until I heard the click of the latch.

I’ve got you, I thought as I opened the door, expecting to find—I was surprised by the clarity of the intuition—my client.

But inside the room there was an older woman, the same age as he, the same age as the desk clerk, and the same age too—it occurred to me—as S.H. would have been, if she had lived. 

She stood before a clean white cot.

I had been prepared to come face-to-face with 315 in this room, whoever 315 was, but despite all the possible faces I had assigned them, I could tell that this woman was not who I was looking for, she was not the person I had followed here.

She was wearing a green uniform, halfway between a nurse’s scrubs and a janitor’s jumpsuit, she must be one of the keepers of this place, the custodian or the docent of whatever museum this was.

Against the wall there was a wooden wardrobe with louvered doors, for a moment I was gripped by a vision of 315 hiding inside, spying on us through the slats.

I stepped forward and the door swung shut behind me, clicking.

Who are you, the woman asked, what are you doing here.

I introduced myself, and she brightened.

My husband had that name, she told me.

I chose to ignore this, I could tell by her tone—her tense—that her husband was dead, I did not want to ask about him.

I explained that I was looking for someone, I had followed them here, and then I asked, eyeing the wardrobe, whether she had seen anyone besides me.

Turn left, the voice announced, so loud I jumped. 

Vainly I searched the ceiling again, from corner to corner, but there were no speakers anywhere.

Where is he, I asked the woman, who did not appear to have heard the voice.

She nodded politely, as though she had not understood the question.

I turned to leave, but the door had locked automatically, there was no keyhole within the room.

I struggled with the knob for a minute before pounding on the door in frustration, three times in succession.

Hello, I called, addressing I don’t know who, the hallway was empty, hello, let me out.

I tried calling out that I was not my client, they had the wrong man, it was a misunderstanding, if they unlocked the door I would leave and never return. 

The silence throughout the building was utter.

Who are you, the woman asked again from behind, in the same tone, as though I had just walked through the door.

Again I introduced myself, again she brightened.

My husband had that name, she repeated, and she pronounced my name.

I flinched to hear her say it, I could feel the walls of my own name weakening.

I walked to the woman’s window and drew the curtain, she had a clear view of the facility’s parking lot.

315’s car was gone, it had vanished from beside my own, mine was now the only vehicle visible anywhere, I was alone here.

The destination is on your left, the voice announced, but to my left there was nothing but the cot.

Suddenly overcome by exhaustion, I sat down on the stiff mattress, just to catch my breath, I told myself.

I needed to gather my strength, break down the door.

315 could not have gotten far.

You look like someone I know, the woman told me.

Then she exclaimed, I know who it is, you look just like my husband.

I smiled weakly.

Oh, she sighed, I wish he were here, he’s going to take me home.

Don’t you like it here, I asked.

No, I’m leaving any day now, I’ve already packed my bags.

She walked toward the wardrobe, and I braced myself.

But when she opened the louvered doors there were only several overstuffed suitcases inside, the same suitcases, I suspected, that she had been brought here with, what was this place.

You see, she said, I’ll be ready when he comes, ready when my husband comes to take me home.

I thought of my client’s photograph, their car loaded with suitcases for their honeymoon. 

It’s me, I told her, I am your husband, you are my wife, I’m here to take you away.

She studied my face warily, but the suspicion lasted only a second, recognition overcame her.

She clasped her hands to her chest and embraced me with thin arms, I held her frailty against me, felt a sudden dampness on my shoulder. 

Oh it is you, it’s really you, you came.

We’re going back to Ocean View, I promised her, stroking her brittle hair, to that little motel where we stayed, the very same room, room 315, do you remember, I’ve booked it already.

She sighed at the memory and I let her go.

By the light in her eyes I could tell she was picturing, if not the Ocean View itself, then a generic hotel, the received image of two lovers alone together in a sunny room, white bedsheets, white beach, something she had seen in movies or in dreams.

We’re really going? she asked.

Yes, I said, but first—

Her face darkened, the hotel was already shifting bitterly, in her mind, back into the prison or hospital or factory in which she was trapped.

But first, I said, I need you to tell me, it’s very important, did anyone else visit today?

No, she answered, no one ever visits me here, no one even calls, you’re the first person to come in all this time, can you believe it?

I believe it, I said, but I could have sworn I saw—

Let me think, she said, closing her eyes.

I closed my own eyes, just to rest them, I told myself, just for a moment.

With my eyes closed, in the darkness and the silence, the voice resounded somehow even more loudly in my skull, I could not tell whether it was before me or behind me.

The destination is on your left, the voice reassured me.

Oh, we’re going, the woman announced excitedly, like the schoolgirl that, somewhere inside her, she still was. 

Then she laughed at herself and asked, Wait, where are we going?

Who are you?

And now I truly was tired, now I could not have opened my eyes if I had wanted to.

I heard myself pronounce my client’s name.

My husband had that name.

I wish you were here.

You have arrived.

***

Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape and the collection White Dialogues. His collection Other Minds and Other Stories is forthcoming. He teaches fiction at the University of Iowa.