When he next looked at the clock by the bed, it was 7:07 p.m. The swirling, rising music of a movie playing too loudly in the next room reached him, but what had broken him out of his sleep was a knocking against the wall. The boys were jumping on the beds, ramming the headboards into the wall. He looked at the phone beside him and thought of calling reception and complaining, but sleep took him before he could.

At 8:03 p.m. the door to the room slammed a few times in succession. Heavy footsteps by his door. At 9:11 p.m., squealing. One of the boys screaming, “Get off! Get off! Get off!”

Martin Askin woke at 11:02 p.m. to the sound of the door slamming again and machine-gun fire in the movie. He sat up and bashed on the wall above his bed.

“Would you shut the fuck up!” he roared, sensing immediately the smallness of his voice in his own room. If he could hear every sound in 608, couldn’t they hear him? “Stop slamming the goddamn door!”

No response. The movie next door played on. He thought he recognized Dwayne Johnson’s voice. His eyes ached when they closed.

At midnight, an adult voice, the first he had heard, split through his dreams like a chisel, leaving a pain in his temple. He was out of the bed in a panic before consciousness had fully arrested him. Martin stumbled in the dark toward the door, shunting into the unfamiliar wall by the bathroom. Just as he opened the door to the hall, the woman in room 608 did the same. Martin had the sense, though he couldn’t be sure, that the blond woman’s voice had been rising and rising and now it was at fever pitch.

She didn’t seem to know whether she wanted to go back into the room or stay out in the hall, holding her head and pacing. A trio of small boys, one of them already blubbering with tears, followed her movements back and forth as other hotel guests emerged from their rooms.

“How can he be gone? How can he be gone?” the woman was crying. She was panting, sweat-slick and badly sunburned. “Richie? Richie? Oh, Jesus. He’s missing. He’s gone!”

One of them was missing.

I snapped out of my sleep, the sweltering night materializing around me, loud through the open windows of the house. The rain had come and gone, but the reptilian and amphibian creatures that dwelled in the forest around my property kept up their barking, hoping for more to break the heat.

I threw back the sheets, sitting on the edge of the bed as the thought evolved from a panicked impulse into a clear message.

I’d put six geese away that evening. Not seven.