Apex Hides the Hurt

The protagonist imagines hypothetical city A, which is renamed and repopulated over time by different groups. The narrator concludes that every new iteration of the city is bound to fail because the inhabitants make the mistake of thinking they own it when they give it a new name.

After the protagonist’s fall cuts the party short, Beverly, the librarian, helps him back to his hotel, but he does not allow her to come up to his room. He is upset to find that his hotel room has been cleaned. He neglected to hang the Do Not Disturb sign, giving the housekeeper the opportunity to clean. The sign lies torn in half on the perfectly made bed. He lies awake in bed thinking about how he got to this point in his life. He asks himself what name he is traveling under, implying that he uses aliases. He thinks about how his life changed after his hospitalization, but he dismisses the distinction of a before and after as “counterfeit” (190).

By noon the next day, the Help Tourists are gone. The protagonist’s clean room and the empty hotel make him feel that things have reset to the day of his arrival. He goes to get coffee and sees Albie, noting how some people cross the street or dart into storefronts to avoid him. The protagonist wonders why the town’s Black founders did not simply name the town “Goodefield” (196); in the history book, he reads that Field was ill and not present at the council meeting, and the renaming vote passed unanimously.

During his own hospitalization, the protagonist refused all visitors, letting neither Bridget, nor his boss, nor his coworkers to see him. He sent in his letter of resignation several weeks after he left the hospital, though he did not have a definitive reason for quitting. He enjoyed being a recluse, but was sad that no one really missed him.

Regina drives him to the pier and shows him the waterways that enabled the barbed wire to be shipped and make the town wealthy. She explains that Abraham Goode came to the town with a family, while Field had lost his on the plantation. They had completely opposite personalities, but they bonded over what they had endured. Regina implies that Winthrop bribed Goode to side with him in the vote. Field died not long after the vote was passed, leaving no family or descendants.

The protagonist asks what Field’s idea for the town’s name was, and she laughs that it was an absurd choice—Struggle. The more the protagonist thinks about it, the more he realizes it is the perfect name: It is the “anti-apex, that peak we could never conquer” (210). He chooses Struggle as the name the town must keep for one year and leaves an envelope bearing his decision at the front desk for Lucky.

That night, he hopes that something will change that will cause him to lose his limp. But the opposite happens. His injured foot hurts even more.