by Ursula Pflug
sss
It was good to put down her bag. The walk from the corner to the hotel was less than a mile but it was hot. It was called the coastal highway but Esme hadn’t actually seen the sea except briefly though the trees early in the morning.
The lobby was empty but there was a round silver bell on the desk. Esme pushed the button and waited, popping a mint from the pink cut-glass candy dish into her mouth. She immediately wished she hadn’t; the mints were unwrapped, slightly dusty and sticky.
A wide curved staircase swept up to the right. Against the walls philodendrons in big pots struggled in the low light that snuck in from the windows, still shuttered to ward off the afternoon heat. Most of the woodwork was painted bright red, peeling in places. The floors were cracked black and white linoleum tile, real linoleum too from the looks of things, made out of linseed oil and not petroleum.
Margit came out from the door behind the desk, which led to a small suite she shared with her husband and their daughter. “Welcome!” she beamed. “It has been so long!”
“Yes.” Esme peered. Could Margit really remember her? It seemed unlikely. Ten years were after all ten years. And she had been little more than a child when she had stayed here before. Maybe Margit was mistaking her for someone else.
“I’m Esme.”
“Of course you are Esme. Who else would you be? Esme Templetree.”
“Thank you, Margit. I didn’t know if you’d still be here and I didn’t know whether you’d remember me. You look amazing.” Margit did look good. She was short and rotund, and only a little more of the second than before. Her hair still framed her pleasing face in thick dark waves.
“Oh, shush. None of us are young anymore,” Margit said. “Except you and my daughter, of course.”
“And how is your husband?” Esme remembered the dinner parties, the acidic white wine from Dream that her aunt had given up after it made her vomit twice in a row.
“John is passed on several years now. I don’t know if you remember he was ill.”
“I’m so sorry to hear, Margit. John was always kind to us.”
“And our daughter—she went away.” Esme didn’t ask in case it was something bad. “Annielle is still here though. She looks so good for her age.”
“I was afraid to ask. Of course it is my aunt I came to see. I just came to the hotel first, because I wasn’t sure.”
“She doesn’t live here. We haven’t been much in touch in a long time, not because I didn’t want to be.”
Esme nodded, and again she didn’t ask. “I thought maybe I could stay a week, go back with the next bus. The driver doesn’t go to Dream anymore. Could I hire a taxi? Some local man with a truck?”
Margit beamed. “Local woman. Jeannie goes to pick up fish and she’s friendly.”
“Do I know her?”
So few people lived at the bottom of the peninsula and of those who did, many, like Margit, never left. When you knew everyone it was hard to go to a place where you didn’t. Hard to go to a city. Some of the young of course wanted nothing more than to run, but others—it was as if the sand itself was sticky.
“We can talk about all of this tomorrow. First I will show you to your room. You would like your old room, yes?”
“My old room?”
“You and Annielle’s old room. The big one at the back.”
Their room had overlooked a field full of salt grass in which a few old ribby horses munched. A corner room, with shabby furniture and tall windows on two walls, their opened shutters filling the room with light. Strange that Esme had forgotten and Margit had remembered.
“I’ll help you with your bag.” Margit came out from behind the desk and with a sprightly step lifted the bag.
“When does the dining room open?” Esme looked at her watch. She’d had to find one in a drawer.
“I’m sorry. My daughter had so many plans to reopen it, hire local chefs, source local food. That’s why Jeannie started bringing the fish, but now it’s mostly just us who eats it.”
Us? Who lived in the hotel other than Margit? In the town? It seemed even more de-populated than the last time. “What do I do about dinner?” she asked.
“Sometimes I cook, but not tonight. There’s a good soup place down the street.” Margit hefted the floral bag and edged it up the stairs, setting it down and resting a moment every few steps. Esme felt guilty but didn’t intervene. The walk from the corner in the scorching heat had exhausted her.
A woman passed them, heading down. She carried a laptop under her arm and gave Margit only the palest of nods. She barely glanced at Esme.
“Who is that?” Esme whispered.
“She’s staying across the hall from you. She’s not from here.”
“Who even is? It’s a hotel.”
“I rent a few rooms on a monthly basis. But I meant she’s staying in the other hotel.”
“Oh?” Esme asked.
“The hotel is a node. People from another dimension can stay here. What I mean is. The hotel exists in two dimensions at once, and in the other one it’s called The Red Arcade.”
They had reached the landing. “My across-the-hall-neighbour, does she have a name?”
“It’s Rachel. I don’t know her last name. And I can’t check the register. She’s booked into The Red Arcade, but she can use this hotel too. Sometimes she breakfasts with us.”
“Wow,” Esme said. “What a good deal.”
“Yes,” Margit said. “Two hotels for the price of one. It’s part of why people come here. The ones who can stand it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It makes some people a little nauseous.”
“Ah. Like altitude sickness or seasickness.”
“A bit.”
sss
When it was light enough Rachel went downstairs to get takeout coffee at the general store across the road. On the way back she saw the charming owner standing on the steps. “Why did you choose to buy this hotel?” she asked. “There’s something magic here. It’s hard to explain.”
She didn’t tell him about the portal. Cool as he was, Berndt didn’t seem ready for that message.
He stood there vaping nicotine, looking thoughtful. “How do you write the ending?” he asked, instead of answering her question.
She thought of inviting Berndt to her writing workshop, promising they’d cover that, but he probably had hotelier paperwork to do. “This morning I woke up remembering a failed story,” she told him. “Sometimes I still want to go back and finish them.”
“See? Endings are hard.”
“Are they hard in songs too?” Esme asked. Berndt wrote beautiful songs when he could scrounge a little time for it.
“Yes. But in a song you can cheat and just reprise the chorus again.”
“The story takes place in a hotel, funnily enough. Maybe that’s why it’s the one I looked at when I couldn’t sleep. I never thought of that.”
Berndt, Rachel noticed, was also drinking takeout coffee from across the road.
He noticed her glance and looked sheepish. “I’d make coffee upstairs but what if the Norwegians are light sleepers? They pay my bills after all.”
Rachel nodded. “That’s what I thought too. You know, I’ve always wondered.”
“What?”
“Why is it called The Red Arcade Hotel?”
“It was called that when I bought it.” Berndt said. “No one could ever tell me why. It isn’t red and there are no arcades.”
“You’d think someone would know,” she said. “There’s always a history to these old buildings.”
“I know, right? Once I had a dream of red arcades, blind arcades on the outside of a building, cinder block like this one. But instead of being at the edge of the forest it was in an arid place by the sea, with a big windswept sandy yard.”
>
Ah. So the building did have a history but only in dreams. Maybe she could use that.
Never able to construct an ending to the hotel story that satisfied her, Rachel hadn’t been able to give it up either and had transferred it through decades and an entire succession of computers. She remembered where she had lived when she began the story. The apartment downstairs was empty; her friend had moved out and the new tenant hadn’t moved in yet. For some reason the door was unlocked. Her musician partner Adam was out of work and so Rachel would go downstairs to write.
Maybe she liked Berndt because he reminded her of Adam. Adam with only the good parts: the charm, the talent, the finger-picking. But because they weren’t involved, she could skip the bad parts. The drug abuse, the philandering, the financial drain. But maybe Berndt wouldn’t have been guilty of any of those things. Except the philandering, but he’d only do that with men. It wasn’t like he could pretend he didn’t like men. That was what people used to do, and it caused all sorts of problems. And if it was okay with her, then it wasn’t philandering.
She remembered how, on Saturday mornings, she’d force herself to stop on the second floor landing instead of going out to visit a friend or go to a café. She’d go into the apartment, empty except for one chair at the table, and slog away. There was a typewriter on the table, a Selectric with a spinning ball. You could buy spare spheres with different fonts. It seemed unthinkable now, to have physical fonts, but at the time Selectrics had seemed modern. Most typewriters back then were Courier, and that was the end of it.
Even though Rachel had struggled to stay in her chair, one of the things, other than the still unfinished hotel story she worked at that weekend, turned out better than she expected and eventually became part of a novel that she sold.
It was a good anecdote, Rachel told herself. Inspiring. Teachable. She ought to share it with her students later in the morning.
It was a different struggle now.
If she could somehow go back to that room, replete with colour and light and poetic descriptions. If she could retrieve both her stubbornness and her enchantment, maybe she could still write something good while she was here. She wanted to write for its own sake. She wanted to write something that felt like dipping a bucket into a well brimming with colours and secrets and raise it, ever so slowly, to the top.
sss
Esme woke very early and swept the leaves in the sandy yard. Her sweeping was a going away present. It was so much harder for Margit without John and their daughter helping. The bus was due today, and Margit had told her this time the driver was coming right to the door. There were passengers with hotel reservations, more than there had been in a long time, and they didn’t want to drag their luggage through the potholes.
Her bag was packed and she had paid her bill. Esme was getting on the bus even though she hadn’t gone to Dream with Jeannie the fish-monger, hadn’t seen her aunt. Her blue dress stuck to her legs, her skin damp with sweat in the heat and now coated with a thin film of dust as well. The sand from the dunes was constantly blown across the highway by the itinerant winds.
Behind her the hotel stood, anomalous as though it was the last vestige of a town that had been razed by some catastrophe either environmental or perhaps spillover from an uprising. She had never questioned it, just as she had never questioned the hotel moving a few miles up and down the highway that everyone agreed it periodically did. Maybe the impossibility of it moving made its other oddnesses pale in comparison and so they were ignored. Why for instance did a three-storey hotel stand near a lonely crossroads with only a few scattered dwellings nearby? Why did the hotel have blind arcades on the east wall, painted and re-painted red long ago, much of the paint now scaled off by the sea wind?
Jeannie had told her she wouldn’t want to see Annielle, not the way she was now. And probably she shouldn’t even go to Dream. Reality wasn’t stable there, maybe even a side effect of Annielle’s madness, as though ripples of unreality spread out from her like waves from a stone thrown into a still pond. The fish in Dream was the best but Jeannie hardly went herself anymore. She was afraid she’d fall into a breach or get caught in a vortex and not be able to come back. The shredding was getting worse.
There had been other disappointments for Esme, including never speaking with Rachel. Esme felt the stranger was a lot like her; they were both drawn to this isolated hotel for reasons no one else would understand. She had hoped that one day Rachel would stop on the stairs and say hello.
This morning Rachel had sat with them and drunk coffee and eaten toast but she hadn’t spoken much, immersed in her screen. She had wavered a little as though she was only partly there. And Esme had once again felt too shy to start the conversation.
She went inside to rest. They’d all have lunch together at the makeshift dining table they’d set up in the lobby and covered with a red checkered oil cloth to hide the splits in the wood. They’d feast on fish from Jeannie’s last, and she said final, trip to the tip of the peninsula. Esme had gathered wild mint for tea, and there was grated carrot salad from the little garden in the back; carrots and peas liked the sandy soil.
On her way back upstairs she noticed a laptop on the table. The computer belonged to Rachel. Esme glanced around. There was no sign of Margit or Rachel. Esme gently opened the lid. There was text on the screen. It looked like a story or a memoir. Maybe Margit had told her Rachel was a writer. She couldn’t remember.
The bus that travelled the coastal highway no longer made the turn into the village. It was already getting dark when Esme asked the driver to let her off at the dusty crossroads.
“I turn around here anyway,” the driver said. “Do you know people there?”
“Sure,” Esme said. It wasn’t actually true, unless Margit still ran the hotel. “The bus used to go farther. It followed the water to one more town before looping back.”
“There isn’t another town.”
“There was when I came ten years ago with my aunt.”
“Did I know her? What was her name?”
But Esme didn’t say. She knew how people talked, probably now more than ever.
sss
Maybe if Rachel had written her aunt’s name, Annielle would still be sane. Esme ran upstairs and pounded on her door.
Rachel opened it. She looked more solid, as though she’d brought more of herself across.
“You must write Annielle being well. Only you can do it. You must write the rifts in the fabric of reality closed.”
Rachel looked honestly puzzled. “You should say tears in the fabric. It can’t be a rift in fabric. A rift can appear in the clouds or the continental shelf or a relationship, but not in fabric.”
Esme stared at her. Rachel didn’t know the power she held in her hands.
But at least this time she saw her. Often she didn’t, passing Esme on the stairs or ignoring her at breakfast as if she didn’t exist. “Take me back with you,” Esme said. “I need to see what your world is like. You have access to my world but I can’t go to The Red Arcade.” Esme felt slipshod and no-account in comparison, but maybe it was like music. Maybe if you were tone deaf no matter how much you practised you’d never be more than a mediocre singer.
“I don’t know if I can take you back but we can try,” Rachel said.
“After lunch. You’ll come to lunch, won’t you?”
She went back downstairs to help Margit cook. She knew she wouldn’t get on the bus back north because everything had changed. It was a heartbreak, but to be a character in a stranger’s story was so much better than not existing at all.
There was the mahi-mahi Jeannie had brought from Dream, and sautéed wild greens all three had gathered together early in the morning. Margit had discovered three dusty bottles of white wine in the back of the pantry.
“Yuck,” Esme said. “Remember how it used to make Annielle throw up?”
“She was just allergic. And maybe ten years have improved it. I don’t have anything else. I don’t drink anymore.”
When she heard the bus pull in Esme went out to meet it.
“Did you go to Dream yet?” the driver asked, opening the door.
“No, I didn’t.” She stepped aside so everyone could get out.
“I thought that’s why you came,” he said. “I thought you needed to go to Dream and see Annielle.”
“You said her name. I wasn’t sure you knew it.”
He opened the baggage compartment for the passengers before he replied. “Everyone knows it. Even if we don’t know her, we know her name.”
“Everyone says she is really crazy now and that it would hurt me to see her.”
“We should go in and have lunch,” the driver said. “We can talk more then.”
Esme’s broom was lying on the ground beside the door. She picked it up and propped it against the side of the building, in the corner of an arcade. The passengers followed them inside. One dreadlocked young man with only a knapsack had preceded them and was already seated at the table.
Margit hugged the driver. “It’s so nice that you came all the way. I’m so sorry.”
“But why?”
“John isn’t here. He passed on two years ago.”
He shrugged. “We must go on, all of us.”
“I need to check people in.” Margit held the door open for the stragglers. “I haven’t got any staff, I’m sorry.”
“We’ll eat first,” Esme said, showing the guests to the table. “Everyone’s starving.”
The young man’s guidebook was propped open on the oil cloth in front of him.
“In the future,” he said, “Lonely Planet will include listings of destinations in other dimensions.”
Esme nodded, wondering where he was from. The past or the future, here or there? In one way it didn’t even matter. Maybe that’s what staying here taught you.
Rachel hadn’t come to lunch and Esme ran up the stairs again to knock. The door was ajar and Esme, presumptuously, poked her head in. The bed was rumpled but there was no one in it. The stranger had snuck out for a walk or she had disappeared, sucked back to her home world.