The Newark Marriott is as good a place as any to toss under bedcovers. Eleven floors of rack 'em and stack 'em, built right into New Jersey's busiest airport. Has one of those lobbies where road warriors tug black rolling cases across faux marble. The wrinkled-khaki men have chins with eighteen hours of stubble, or hopelessly creased business suits, or both. They have surrendered just that last tie-torque, loosened the knot, popped the button that hemmed—for hours—a swollen larynx. They surrender no real eye contact. The women are brittle skinned. Hours in the pressurized hulls of airplanes have wrung the moisture from them. They are no longer even able to shed tears.

After offering his company card for an imprint at reception, Neil had settled, for a moment, into a stuffed chair. It was one of those oversized thrones ubiquitous in lobbies worldwide. For a hundred-thousand dollars, he could not have described its upholstery just moments after standing again and moving off. Next to him was a minuscule glass-topped table. Behind it, a vase the size of an oil barrel. From the vase sprung a 90's sort-of arrangement—stiff, twirling tendrils of variegated color, synthetic broadleaves, what appeared to be an unbound sheaf of wheat dyed in hues not encountered in nature, fake moss. Dust nowhere in the lobby but on those fake fronds. At the revolving door two staff members carried on a conversation. They spoke as he imagined Jersey Shore people would. The one, a Hispanic man in a vest and cummerbund, was shaped like a fellow who loved his tripe menudo. He seemed to be proffering advice to the other, a slim acne-pocked youth, an apprentice bellman perhaps, a mere boy with hair clipped closely on the sides but long and gelled back in a flourish on top—a sort of hair tail, if one thinks of that wildly kinetic dust and ionized gas that trails a comet's nucleus.

"All kinda spears gettin' trown in here today." The older bellman waved his forefinger to emphasize a point. "You gotta learn to be careful, but at the same time, let it roll off."

"What you talkin' 'bout, spears?"

"Like darts, man.

"Darts?"

"Dey trowin' at yo back."

The apprentice nodded in a pretense of understanding. Yet the teacher knew that, still, his meaning went unappreciated.

"Look," he said. "It's sharp roun' here. You get cut." Then the wise bellman turned to pull open the door for another bag-tugger. "You gotta watch yo back, and yo friend's."

Suddenly the captain of the bellman hovered above Neil, then spoke. "Sir, may I assist with that bag?" An authentically first-generation timbre and diction—what was that? East African? Ethiopian? Eritrean?

"I'm fine, thank you." Neil routinely declined this service. His expense reports allowed no provision for gratuities. Their rows and columns were straightforward: meals, lodging, room tax, transportation. You couldn't recoup a courtesy. In fact, Neil had developed resentment, over the years, for hotel staff who offered. Bellhops with their eyeballs on his bags. Departing room-service porters pausing expectantly at the door before shrugging and slipping across the threshold. Maids who came to turn down the bedcovers. (This last curiosity so perplexing in its valueless ness.) He thought of them, in time, as inconsiderate half-people whose role in cosmology was to stack one inconsequential embarrassment of his own hyper frugality upon another until they became consequential just in their dimensions and bloated complexity, until there was a heap of alienating stinginess that made him question—fundamentally—his own decency. After all, on the other hand, these are just folks trying to get by. And isn't it true to say that we are all just trying to get by? Aren't all of us simply squirrels trying to store a few nuts away for stormy times? For winter?

Now, three time zones to the east of home (wherever that is), Neil's body rotates like a planet above a strange mattress. He had made the mistake of checking his e-mail before bed—just a quick dial-up and audit of the in-box to see if there was anything truly pressing. But each line presented its own distraction, some projects going awry, one or two with admonishments that the sender had not known Neil would be out of the office, implying that this had set back the day's goals, and demanding what now to do or some other satisfaction. Too, there were several of the variety Neil called "blistering snot-grams," electronic lectures or reprimands or inelegant missives of displeasure over something he had, or had not, done before he left town. Usually from the same whiney passive-aggressive shits who refused to pick up the phone or walk over to his cubicle—people utterly horrified at even the smallest prospect of confrontation. Even if such a thing might prove ultimately fruitful.

All these e-mails said, "Tell us what to do." They said, "Respond to our needs. Give us what we desire. Do better next time."

Every night a different pillow. All of them too hard, smelling like chemicals or someone else's head. And these sheets that aren't fitted, that come quickly undone at the corners. Comforters that refuse to shed their raised crop of rayon pills. The smoke alarm blinks. Asynchronously, the diode-sized light on the black brick of his computer surge-protector blinks as well. The absence of timing between the two lights sets up a dissonance that distracts and fascinates Neil for a brief time. Then there is the incessant march of the digital alarm clock to note. Early in his career he was never quite sure whether he'd successfully set these clocks. Now Neil always leaves a wake-up call.

The e-mails, the telephone messages, his boss's most recent poorly managed meeting that went on for an hour and a half beyond its scheduled end, the last gathering in which Neil had made a presentation that was soundly ridiculed by all present in a macabre game of pile-on-all of these indignities—Neil tosses in the sheets because of these. His seething hatred for all of this coils upon itself in a conspiracy to drive sleep further away. As the moments gather and sag under their own weight, Neil begins to think he might well rise, log in again, and dispatch some of his own correspondences. Send a finger-wagger back to some other unfortunate, or let fall some toxic snowflake from his own electronic pen. Somewhere, someone, tomorrow morning—this morning—would open his or her in-box and read the imprimatur of Neil's metastasizing loathing for this job, this vocation he had chosen, this pursuit that was never an occupation, but a position—as in assume the position—BOHICA: bend over, here it comes again.

Neil hears the scratching of mice feet on the carpet at his room's door. Through the ribbon of hallway light that bleeds under the door crack comes his statement in a hotel envelope. This is something Neil likes—that he can check out by pressing a sequence of keys on the television remote. He can avoid the hotel people at the checkout counter full of their vacuous how-was-your-visit questions and automaton-like efficiency. The person who thought up this modern convenience should have got one of those big prizes like the Nobel or Pulitzer, or an Addy.

Neil launches himself from the alien mattress. The covers go to the floor. His bare feet hit the carpet. He has decided that sleep will not come tonight—perhaps he'll be able to recover some of it on the airplane. If there's not much turbulence, and if he isn't seated one row in front of the lavatory, if there isn't a two-year-old screeching brat nearby whose ears hurt, if the flight attendants don't pester him every four seconds whether he wants a drink or headset or magazine or pillow, and if the plane doesn't explode in mid-air or auger into the side of a mountain range (although if that happens, it technically wouldn't keep him from sleep).

In the dark, Neil reaches for the trousers he flung over the room's desk chair. He tugs them on, one leg at a time. Clicks on the lamp and locates his socks. Laces up his shoes. Instead of the Oxford button-down, though, he wiggles into a sweatshirt. To protect the world from the sight of his bed-mussed hair, he pulls on a Colorado Buffaloes ball-cap from his luggage that is just for this purpose: you never know when the fire alarm might go off. You don't want to be showing the other hotel guests your particularly virulent strain of bed-head.

Neil checks to confirm that the plastic card-key is still in the pants pocket and opens the door. The hallway is long and maize-colored. The carpet stretches to his left and right. To his right the hall turns a corner a few rooms down—the tableau puts him in mind of those scenes in The Shining where the little boy keeps circling the hallways on his Big Wheel, encountering terrifying things. Neil turns left—which is, anyway, the direction of the elevator shafts. He arrives there in the little elevator lobby with its silly credenza, two stuffed chairs and ashtray with the hotel's logo pressed in the sand (what marketing propagandist thought that one up?) with one half-buried non-filtered Camel snuffed therein like a burrowing emphysema-projectile. Neil pokes at the L button. A ring of light around it glows. There is an electronic chime from halfway across the cosmos and the doors slip sideways. Neil steps into the box and waits for it to drop.

The lobby is the same cavern it was earlier in the day except that it contains no life-forms milling about. Every step he takes sends an oscillating reverberation across the dead space, so that his footsteps return to him in fading echoes. A single clerk concerns himself with paper behind the reception counter. If he glanced up at Neil's footfalls, it must have been before Neil noticed him—for he does not glance up now. For a moment Neil contemplates exiting the lobby through its monstrous revolving glass doors into the New Jersey night. Fresh air, he thinks briefly, then wonders if New Jersey has any. These are swamplands, right? Gas-lands? Garbage-heap and toxic-chemical dump-lands? Meadowlands? He had passed, in the taxi from the city, Giants Stadium. They say Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried there under one of the goalposts. Funny how the night lends itself to free association, particularly a night such as this where sleep—that unattainable commodity—may as well be as far away as some exotic precious metal unknown to earth and available only in the ores of the eighth undetected planet from Proxima Centauri. (Closest star to Earth for you factoid buffs, yet still 4.3 light years or 10 trillion kilometers from us—roughly 1.2 parsecs distant. In other words, un-fucking-attainable.)

Neil is like a zeppelin that has lost its rudder. He wonders how far from here the Hindenburg blew up (the answer, fact-freaks, is about 50 miles). He wonders why Americans obstinately refuse in the manner of the most obstreperous donkeys to convert to the metric system. He wonders whether, even now at this ungodly hour, e-mails continue to flow like tainted fluid into the electronic reservoir of his in-box. Whether e-mails, like water, refined petroleum, sloe gin, magma, piss, mercury above -36 degrees Fahrenheit, blood, bull semen, Kool-Aid and corporate policy, are governed by the laws of hydrodynamics. Do the same principles of ideal and viscous liquids apply? The same tenets of turbulence? Are boundary layers, diffusion, shock waves, intersections of surface discontinuities, and flow over fixed bodies part of the equation? Could Polynesians derive fabulous stick-maps by reading the shapes of these disconsolate waves? All this hard, mid-night thought of fluids.

Neil hears the small sound someone makes who is shedding tears. The sound of quiet weeping.

A woman is seated on a long sofa behind the giant vase. Her luggage is arrayed at her feet. She is work-attired, her long and admittedly attractive legs in nylons, hair in place. A mid-forties businesswoman, but clearly aggrieved, clearly distressed. The tissue in her well-manicured hands dabs at her face, and Neil sees that her tears have left her eye makeup in disarray. All of his experience and conditioning tell him to avoid this woman, to cross the lobby and exit into the gas-lands night, to abandon her to whatever private troubles she has. To let her wallow in the consequences of her choices, or sins. Yet he stands immobile, the soles of his shoes immensely heavy and unified with the lobby floor. He cannot move, he cannot flee. What alchemy transforms him from the most cynical, disgruntled man alive to something, someone, less so, if only for the briefest instant?

And so, against all probability, he asks, "Do you need something?"

She looks up, her tissue frozen in space. "No, thank you," she says. "I'm fine." This amazing lie we all tell.

"No, really," Neil says. "Obviously something has upset you. I'd be happy to help."

Her shoulders slump and she folds into herself. The temblor of a sob shakes her.

"Sit with me," she says.

Her husband lies incubated, hooked to all manner of monitors and other medical interventions, in Dallas. He has suffered a cardiac infarction the size of a small Jovian planet. He lives at the boundary of life. And while there are several flights from Newark to DFW—even from JFK and LaGuardia—none are leaving now, and those leaving first thing after dawn are overbooked.

Even so, she awaits a cab. She believes she'll have a better chance of getting home today if she's physically present at the terminal.

All of this information flows from her like a dam-burst, Neil at her side. Her perfume commingles with the scent of her grief. Normally, Neil would be unable to separate himself from her scent, her woman-ness, the essential fact that he sits in intimate proximity to an attractive female who is not his wife, yet whose smell washes him. He should become aroused. The full length of his thigh and the full length of her thigh are pressed firmly together. But now, instead, in this nameless, faceless cavern, he merely laces her fingers with his, and holds her hand until the cab arrives. They do not exchange names or business cards.

Whether her husband lives or dies.

Whether she gets a flight.

What her company or business is, whether she has kids, whether she likes living in Texas, whether she likes living—life—at all.

He will never hear another thing about her—