The Colonial Hotel

by Jonathan Bennett

  I would choose a single day, even a meal perhaps, and recast it in my mind carefully, ensuring I would not rush and miss anything. Taking it as slowly as I could manage I would polish the details in my mind’s eye, and then I would force myself to look harder, be sure not to miss anything. If I discovered a lost fragment of conversation, or a tension I’d never considered at the time, I would turn it over and over until it gave up whatever new gem it hid. A single day could now easily take two or three to properly unearth. This was how, especially at first, I kept Helen close.

  In my cell there was a cot made with webbed, criss-cross black rubber strapping. There was also a bucket. This was switched out every two days.

  On arrival they took my shoes from me—which were, by that time, the last remaining article of my original belongings. Some time ago I had been given an old yellow T-shirt and army surplus pants. My hair and beard were long during those years—especially uncomfortable when it was hot.

  They fed us watery soup at midday. The distant flavour was powdered celery, I came to decide. Some rice was in it. Every few days cooked meat would come in the cup. Mostly white, it was boney and gamey but was a welcome relief from the almost constant hunger we faced. I took it to be a bird of some kind, maybe a gull or a pigeon they had caught or bought from a local trapper. Occasionally, cooked oily fish would be served with rice. I lost a great deal of weight, but when I was no longer doing physical work it levelled off.

  In the late afternoon during the long summers, sunlight streamed in through the window hole. The light was toffee-coloured and warm and, if the wind blew in the right direction, I could smell the sea air—the brine of it.

  In winter, wet and cold leeched in through the floor and walls, wind whistling in through the window. The first winter a hole opened up under one of the bricks at the floor to the outside. The rain falling off the roof was pooling against the wall and the bonding in the cement dissolved. One evening a field mouse poked its head in. I froze. It sniffed the air a moment, looking for danger before going back out the hole.

  The next day I saved two grains of rice from the soup. I got right down onto the floor and put my face close to the hole, the two grains of rice six inches away and just in my field of vision. I waited but nothing. The next night I tried again. It came in, but saw me so close and scurried off. Next I tried leaving the rice and just listening. It came right at dusk and ate. Each night I began to inch my way closer along the floor until I could see it. If mice are capable of such a thing, we developed a trust. The twitch of it, tiny teeth chewing on the grain. The whole world, the essence of evolution, the feelings that one can have for another living creature played out for me as I waited and watched that mouse. Then one day it just stopped coming.

  For an entire season the rain pelted down onto the metal roof, keeping me awake many nights. Whenever it stopped, I would fall into an immediate sleep, only to wake as the next wave of it pressed down against the building.

  I grew more aware of smells and sounds, especially the subtle ones. My eyes never properly recovered from the explosion. I do not know which chemicals they used to make the explosives, but the flash-blindness I experienced was the result, I suspect. What else could have caused permanent retinal damage? What were the chances that I happened to be looking right at the explosion? I am partially blind now. How fitting—some cruel irony, given our name in their language.

  My daughter, there was a summertime game I enjoyed. The deep golden light would come pouring in the window hole. This beam of direct light came on cloudless days for a few short weeks once a year. If I stood on my cot, for about an hour I could hold my hands out in the shape of a cup and fill them with sunlight. Or I would take the sun on my face, imagining I was still sitting in the hotel’s café, drinking my coffee, eating my brioche. Bread. Delicate strands of sweet, white bread. On two or three days every year, when the sun was at a certain place in the sky, the beam would inch down and reach low enough to touch my prick, or warm my ass if I perched on the cot. Please excuse the specificity.

  If you are alone long enough, any new event is cause for joyful rapture.

  The first night guard we had was a tall man with thick arms and a flat face and nose. Yes, his nostrils were what you noticed. He was a religious man, and spoke fair English. He was a Christian—less common in the North.

  Doctor, I have Bible for you, to pray. I will take it back tomorrow night. Was this a signal I was about to be executed? Or was he simply extending out his hand to me, one man to another?

  It was winter at the time, and there was almost no light good enough in the cell for me to see words on the page, even at midday. I turned pages quickly until I found a story my eyes could rest on. It was Exodus, and baby Moses being saved from the Nile, his sister Miriam ensuring he survived to play the role he did. But oh my eyes were poor, the paper thin, and the type small. Before long I could see nothing clearly and so I simply held it. A book. The book.

  I was never religious. That night alone with the guard’s Bible did not change me. But I held it close, smelling the paper and the binding. A flower that had been pressed between the pages fell out. I ran it past my nose. Finally, it gave me the faintest hint. Lavender. Baby Moses and lavender.

  You are a good man, I said, thanking the guard the next night when he came for it to be returned. He nodded. I understood that he had placed himself in some danger offering the book to me. You see, my daughter, there are strong hearts and kindness inside even the bodies of enemies. Of course, he was not my enemy. Neither side was.

  * * *

  HELEN WAS NOT THE ONLY one, the only memory, with which I occupied myself. The dreams of my father would begin with a word, or a sentence, as a voice speaking to me. His words were clear and they encircled me.

  Home is accommodation. That was one of his aphorisms—their meaning would always twist this way and that. His voice was deep and musical and in my dreams it would be exactly as I remembered it. Not from the end when he was older, alone, depressed and sick, but from my childhood or teenage years, when he was vital and serious, and often on the television or radio.

  I spent a lot of time listening to my father’s voice. Curled up at the top of the stairs, he with friends in the living room, drinking wine and arguing, laughing. My father was always at the centre of things, pushing the line of thinking a touch too far, to see precisely where that line was crossed. It was a skill he made use of in the media later in life.

  His voice boomed in my dreams, thundered, and sometimes the claps woke me—the sound of him and the smell of his boozy breath, his emphatic reasoning—taking some minutes to properly dissipate. You must hear the recordings of him I kept on tapes. I wish I could. I do not miss my possessions though. I have been here for so long I suspect I have mostly forgotten them. But I do miss playing those tapes. Following his death I would listen to them. They helped me keep him close and whole. They drew out my grief. Maybe that is why he comes to me in my dreams, still alive, full of spunk and reverence for ideas and solutions.

  The tapes are with your great aunt Hesione. When I first left to work with Helen, I sold everything—car, furniture. I asked my father’s younger sister to store a few boxes in her basement for me, the bare essentials with which I could not part. My framed degrees. A copy of a dissertation. Some old letters. Photo albums. Precious books—some written by my father. My college jacket. Perhaps other items too. And the tapes. These things are yours now. Go retrieve them. Listen to the tapes again for me, will you? Hear his voice and his mad way. I miss him. He would have been a wonderful grandfather.

  In the summers my father wore a Panama hat, leather sandals with a buckle, and loose shirts. He would sit on the porch, drink an iced tea, and read. He always read. Newspapers mostly. Local ones written by the petty criminals, as he’d say, but he’d also read papers from around the world. Magazines and newspapers would land on our doorstep with a belated thud—sometimes weeks or even m
onths after publication. They came from countries he both had, and had never, visited. You must read the hardened criminals too, he would insist.

  Your grandfather did not care much for professional journalists, or journalism, as a rule. He would rail against their logic, their editorial cheap shots, their inflammatory positions. He would write letters to the editor aloud, narrating to his mythical secretary, Miss Jones, who was, presumably, somewhere nearby typing as he spoke.

  Miss Jones! A letter, Miss Jones! This is how they would always begin. With a groan he would get out of his chair, either on the porch or in the living room depending on the season, and pad to the kitchen for coffee or booze, depending on the time of day. Miss Jones worked unpredictable hours, as my aunt used to say when I was older.

  Dear Editor, which, I confess, I address you as, sir, solely because it is your formal title and not because I see evidence of you editing anything. Dear Editor, your editorial column in today’s edition was so weakly lobbed, my nine-year-old boy could easily have scored a double from it. He would, occasionally, work me in with a wink (if he suspected I was really listening). While your recall of the prime minister’s promise from his election campaign is correct, you have suffered an amnesia of convenience, self induced, to service your call for tighter fiscal control. The hand that gently guides your pen, i.e., your owner and master, today has applied enough pressure that from where I sit, it should rightly be called a proper squeeze. Are you getting all this, Miss Jones? He would go on, peeling apart and laying bare the flaws in argument, occasionally thanking Miss Jones for asking him to clarify something he’d said. By the time he finished dictating, he would have made more coffee, or mixed himself a new drink, and would be settled back down into his chair. I never saw him actually write and send anything.

  Yes, he loathed journalists as a rule. But as with most rules there were some exceptions, so those he liked he didn’t just enjoy, he admired deeply. He would give them pet names and, if they were women, he would sing made-up love songs to them following his reading of an article that he found particularly stirring. If they were men he might talk to them aloud, as if they were sitting across from him at that very moment, his opinions being asked for as a contribution to the piece in question.

  You must think of my father, your grandfather, as a crank, or a fool. He may have been those things. But, in truth, he was a brilliant man. A sought after economist, widely published, he guest lectured at universities and held increasingly important positions within the private banking sector and, ultimately, government itself, as the assistant deputy minister of finance.

  When the government finally changed, he knew it was time to call it quits. He had made no friends on the other side. So the ranting he performed on the first floor of our house became his retirement hobby. I came to see his theatrics as something more deliberate. Either he predicted his role in the media, or was thoughtfully preparing for it through dress rehearsals. Other than some of his close friends or colleagues, or a group of graduate students, for many years I was his only real audience. Then, the country became his audience.

  His voice came to me in dreams where we talked together. He would ask me how I am. What are you thinking about in here? And I would tell him of Helen, or of you. Mostly though, I would listen to him, the ebb and flow of his voice carrying his active mind to me. Sometimes I would wake and be so sure he was making deep sense of the world, interpreting whole patterns and structures for me, revealing their complexity. Yet if I tried to hold onto his words, what he’d been saying, they would not be there. I grew to understand that he came to me as a kind of vision—a spirit of conversation to keep me sane. He was a companion through deadened winter nights, alone in that cell hardly bigger than a closet, alone with only my ability to remember, to invent, to imagine. I am thankful I was given these gifts. In other cells, other men were not so fortunate. Their cries of desperation, pain, loneliness, went unheard into the night because of their void within.

  When a mind is given no stimulation, time itself breaks down in ever smaller increments, eventually ceasing to properly be. Although living, you exist as one of the dead. What I now suspect to be whole years’ worth of time would have passed and I saw no other person, other than the momentary flash of a guard’s face as he handed me food. I gave up measuring days, or weeks, and settled down into myself. Moments from my past and moments yet to come, maybe never to come, all became my waking life. This is how you and I have been together. This is how I have preserved every precious moment with Helen.

  As time dissolved, the structured way of living in the world did too. Was I still myself, Paris? Or was I some earlier or future version of myself? Was I just a continuum of a person, a man that had always existed down through the ages, like a roadway built long ago by an ancient civilization that never fell out of daily use? As each age came and passed, did the road survive, always receiving and guiding those in need of getting from one place to the other? If so, it is in this way that I survived and could be with you when we were kept apart, and know I could stay with you in the future. It was also how I could stay with Helen, long after that jeep disappeared down the mountainside.

  Helen would speak in her sleep. I would lie awake listening to her talk nonsense, sometimes being able to catch single words, fragments of our day at work. But on a few occasions, late into the evening, I was awoken with a start. She had night terrors, unable to be consoled or calmed. She would rant and thrust with her arms, tearing at her hair. She did not mention these episodes the next morning and I did not bring them up. I told myself I did not want to embarrass her. But in truth I did not want her to stop having them. In this state, she was reliving events of her past. It was all I had of her history. So I kept this private, selfish access to myself.

  In my cell, there was a dream I would have of Helen. I came to see the dream as punishment for my betrayal of her, for breaching her privacy. In it she was a young girl. But it was an absurd dream. How could I conjure her? I was never shown photographs of her as a child. My sleeping mind had so little to work with. But I suppose girls look the way they do and I must have subtracted years from her, age retreating from her face, the fragile lines of experience becoming gradually shallower then smoothing out completely.

  In the beginning of my dream, she was about eleven. It always began with her hanging upside down from a tree branch, the world about her a vibrant green. She then saddled it, legs swinging underneath her. She calls out to someone, her mother? She is at a picnic, or is at the end of her street, playing at a park. In the air her voice is thrilled, lyrical, chanting a song in minor thirds. Her freedom is so vast and filled with hope. Then the dream would pick up speed.

  She was a teenager. Something had changed. She had experienced a new part of the world and it’s a barb that has pierced her. My dream darkens. There has been a violation of her earlier hope. I sense she is in pain but I cannot reach her. She will not face me. Her beauty has already become the shaper of destiny, but instead of providing the world with radiant joy and the world responding in kind, something has damaged this circle of light. There is a void growing inward, deepening inside her. To counterbalance, she has gone on attack. She is filling with fight like a wounded domestic animal that will no longer trust its master.

  Helen is against the wall in her high school gymnasium locker room. It is after school. I must tell it to you because it is the truth—my ghastly dream cobbled together from Helen’s night terrors. I must tell it because I am not there to stop it.

  He has Helen against a wall of lockers. Can you see her now? It is after school. Has she told you? Has she pressed you with the details, frightened you with them until you cried for her? I am not there to throw him down, to beat his face with my fist—yes, I might be a doctor, but I am still a man. She is being shoved against the lockers and her life is being altered, and once it has begun, the horrible hurt and his pitiful acting at it, it lasts until it suddenly stops and soon she is left
there, alone with her wet face and bloody smears. And everyone knew. It carried itself about the school contagiously. But they had the details all wrong. The lust and desire were all his. She had tried to delay it once again, fighting him off with smart words and clever arguments, and in failing to do so, was left with nothing to say other than please stop it over and over, as if to forever remind herself that this was what she really meant.

  This dream of violence and hate happened many times—far more times than did the night terrors on which it was based. I could not make the story stop or change. I could not stop him because I could not make myself enter into the dream, pull him away and belt his face. Men such as me are never there at the right time. This story is the oldest story in the world, the one that launches a thousand dark dreams.

  * * *

  I WAS AN UNWANTED CHILD. This I already knew, but after my father died, my aunt Hesione could no longer keep the secret. In short bursts, after glasses of sherry, she relieved herself of what she saw as my mother’s crime. With many children already from previous marriages, my mother and father fell in love and were wedded within a year. My aunt let me know that she felt this union was doomed from the start.

  Paris, you were to be the bond that was to keep them together, were her words. Yet shortly after I arrived, my mother’s previous husband returned. After a year of going back and forth, she left my father. She and the other children moved away to be with their father. My father, furious, broken, and hurt, insisted on keeping me. He was in the throes of hiring lawyers and digging in, when my mother arrived with me, and simply gave me to him. In this manner, it was decided. It was the only kind thing she ever did for him, my aunt said.

  My mother was not to be mentioned in the presence of my father. My aunt Hesione was the surrogate. But my father, for all his eccentricities, did his best to raise me. At the end of his life—while his pain was being managed—he had a burst of self-reflection and spoke of my mother. He confessed how much he had loved her. He told me what she wore on their wedding night. Imagine! He also spoke of a dream she’d had. He grabbed me by the face, quite hard for a sick, old man, and said, Paris, before you were born your mother dreamed she was giving birth to a flaming torch. Could I have named you anything but Paris after that? And he laughed and laughed: a wonderful sight to see a dying man laugh. It might have been the last time he did so.