The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  I just— she started, then realized she had no idea where she meant to go, no verbal path to follow.

  She opened her eyes.

  I just— she tried again, but stopped when she noticed the detectives making eye contact. On Detective Hall, she thought she saw the slightest hint of a smile.

  I’m sorry, Detective Winter said. It’s a bit of a running joke between us, as partners. When people start a sentence that way.

  I just, I just, Detective Hall said, a false pitch creeping into her voice. Was Clare being mocked?

  Detective Winter closed the folder. It is, in our opinion, the worst way to start a sentence in the English language.

  Later she would wonder if the detectives had suspected she was the one who hit her husband with the car and fled the scene, if they had checked her alibi the moment she left the station, expecting to find a gap in her story. When she spoke next with the colleagues who had been on the conference call, she had searched for the scent of mistrust in the air.

  The mountain air was cool and thin. From the train station, it had taken an hour by taxi to reach the Cure Hotel, the fee nearly flattening Clare’s envelope of cash. The white Lada had labored going up the steep road, stuttering so badly the driver had to drop her a mile south of the hotel. Now she stood light-headed, her thighs quivering, in front of a concrete hulk surrounded by mountain forest, a hundred block-shaped windows peering out on a vast green lawn. The structure was ten stories high and looked like a Soviet relic, a concrete space station abandoned to nature, except it was not abandoned at all. People in matching beige tracksuits—guests, she assumed—were milling around the grounds, stomping on the light fog rising from the grass like smoke.

  In the lobby, the ceiling was flat and low, the tile floor and furniture the same shade of beige as the tracksuits. An impressive amount of art hung on the walls—large, colorful abstract paintings in black frames. The reception desk was surrounded by tall ferns. They looked a lot like the ferns her mother had kept in the lobby of the Seahorse.

  A man in a red polo shirt checked her in. She asked him for the room number her husband had written down; indeed there was a vacancy. Behind him an open door looked down a short hallway and into an office, where a woman sat at a boxy desktop. She wore a green blouse, the arms printed with turquoise butterflies. She had perfect posture, but her carriage struck Clare as artificial, the kind of person who was always imploring herself to sit up. Clare wondered if she was writing a memo or a manual or a death threat.

  The people in identical beige tracksuits continued to stream in and out of the lobby. When Clare asked about them, the man said there were two kinds of people staying here: patients and guests. If she wanted to become a patient, she could do so at any time, provided she was able to pay the fees. He said the hotel specialized in the relief of pain. Their approach was to consider the entire patient: a backache was not simply a backache, but a symptom of something greater; if they found the root of the problem together, the pain could be eliminated.

  This man had the starched, upright manner of a person working hard to contain a well of deep feeling. Even the collar of his red polo had been carefully pressed. She could imagine how all these people showing up with their suitcases full of pain would take its toll.

  He handed her a brochure for their hydromassage chamber.

  Clare thanked him for the information and fled.

  She walked quickly down a long, cold hallway, her footsteps echoing.

  She had an hour to kill, according to the paper her body was presently digesting, and so she followed signs for the hotel restaurant, which led her down one corridor and then another, each a little darker, a little chillier, than the one before. At the restaurant, she was the only guest, though judging by the tracksuits there were plenty of patients. She sat in a rattan chair and swallowed a glass of lukewarm water in two gulps. She ordered a pan con queso, all the while assuring herself that she was not, in fact, traveling alone.

  She unzipped her backpack and placed the white box on the table. Oil from her fingers had left translucent circles on the outside; the top was dented, the tape loosening at the edges. The box seemed less troublesome somehow out here in the mountains.

  She stared down at the box. She poked it with a spoon. She did not hear any kind of movement inside, and for a moment she imagined raising the lid and finding nothing but air.

  She brought the box close to her face. She loosened the tape on one side and pushed the lid up a little. She peered into the tiny slit, her eyelashes scratching the cardboard.

  A reel of film, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand.

  She put the box down.

  The air-conditioning was so forceful that she was shivering in her chair, a cloth napkin spread across her knees for warmth. No one in the restaurant was taking photos.

  Her food arrived and she devoured half her sandwich. She stuffed the box back into her backpack and left in search of the bathroom; it had been hours since the train. When she returned, the sight of her own half-eaten meal stopped her. Before she had been sitting with her back to the entrance, but her plate and water glass had been moved to the opposite side of the table, as though she had been facing the doorway. Her napkin had been sitting to the left of her plate. Now it rested against the translucent belly of the glass. A waiter with a tray wove around the tables; the patients in beige tracksuits lifted forks. On some tables, red roses stood in slim silver vases, the edges blackened, as though someone had been burning them. She pinched a leaf and made contact with stiff plastic. A ceiling fan turned slowly above. She was still very hungry, so she sat within this new configuration and finished her lunch, even though it looked as though a different person had been eating at this table, filling her with the fear that she was somehow consuming what did not belong to her.

  * * *

  The elevator was out of service. She climbed a hulking stone staircase to a monochrome hallway, the walls and carpeting that now-familiar beige. There she was troubled to discover sounds emanating from the room they were supposed to be checking into. She pressed her ear to the door, catching hushed voices and a light thumping, as though someone was slapping the bedspread. She heard a scream and leapt back, into the center of the hall. The room key was old-fashioned, a brass stone in her hand. She squeezed the serrated teeth.

  She kneeled on the carpet and peered through the bell-shaped keyhole. She imagined her iris telescoping into the room and reporting back on what was going on in there, and this visualization exercise was something of a success because she was able to make out a man and a woman fucking on a bed. She could hear the hungry panting. She could see the jerking limbs, the quivering flesh. Her vantage had severed their heads from their bodies. Their feet waved back and forth like hands. Their knees were blurred orbs.

  What are you doing? a familiar voice said.

  She was startled to look up and see Richard standing over her. He set his duffel bag down on the carpet. He held the same heavy, toothed key, and he was insisting their room was in fact across the hall from the one she had just been spying on. He had snuck up on her, as she’d not thought to check to make sure she wasn’t being followed.

  We’re in room number seven, she whispered, not wanting to disturb the headless couple.

  Yes, number seven. He pointed at the opposite door.

  His eyes were bright, his hands clean. His pants looked like they had just been ironed. How had his arrival been so effortless? She supposed the dead played by a different set of rules.

  She shook her head, mouth sealed tight. He shrugged and unlocked the door.

  She stood, knees inflamed from the carpet.

  See? he said, stepping grandly into the empty room.

  The room overlooked a terrace that bled into an emerald expanse of forest, iced with fog. A man was sitting down there, reading a book. Clare was watching from too great a distance to see the book—to see if it was, as she suspected, The Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands—or even the man himself, but
he radiated familiarity, and it was not the comforting kind. Dread fell like a mist. She got her binoculars, but by the time she returned to the window the man was gone. She felt even more uneasy with him no longer in sight. Now he could be anywhere: outside their door, in the stairwell, hiding in the shower with a knife.

  When she turned from the window, her husband was leaning against a wall, his black duffel at rest by his feet. He had stepped out of his shoes, kept his socks, the red ones she had seen hooked over the shower rod.

  Well, Richard said. I guess we’re finally going to have that talk.

  She told herself she was not unwilling.

  She sat down on the edge of the hard bed. She felt like she was back in the police station, unsure of to what extent to disrobe, the implications of doing too little or too much. She kept her shoes on. The furnishings were simple, a mountaintop dormitory. The room was curiously scentless. A sheet with a welcome message, sealed inside a plastic sleeve, lay on the rectangular dresser. The message, in English and in Spanish, read WELCOME AND GOOD LUCK!

  Are you planning on getting into a tracksuit? Clare said. She wondered if his body temperature seemed lower by about, say, five degrees. The corn-silk hair at his temples was even lighter, almost luminescent, and his expression still suggested he was thinking deeply about a problem he could not share.

  I’m beyond the reach of their methods, he said. You might be too.

  Clare remembered what the man in the red polo, the man who looked like he knew plenty about pain, had said about finding the root of the problem; he had made it sound as straightforward as digging around in the dirt and pulling a plant out by the tendrils.

  What are you doing here? she said. Where are you going?

  I’m in terrible trouble, Richard said. I’m being pursued.

  Pursued by who? The fat vein pulsed around her anklebone.

  His tongue flicked across his lips. His eyes narrowed.

  By you, I had assumed.

  By me? Your own wife?

  You have to admit you’ve been acting rather strangely.

  You’re the one who’s been acting strangely!

  Like the great change had continued even after his death.

  Strange is a sliding scale, I suppose. He bent a knee, pressed a socked foot flat against the wall. A phone rang in the room next door. He explained that he was being followed, that he had been receiving threatening phone calls, and when he saw her in Havana—well, he drew the logical conclusion.

  I can help, Clare said. I’m becoming an expert in surveillance.

  He crossed his arms and tipped his head against the wall, dubious. What would you know about surveillance?

  This time, she would not be a sight. She would create one.

  Clare picked up a chair and jammed the back under the doorknob, barricading them inside. As she rooted around in her backpack for her nail scissors, she counted the rules for hiding. Don’t go into attics or basements; avoid the dark; forget all about showers; lock yourself in the closet; jam the chair under the door; be willing to adopt a disguise; never, under any circumstances, investigate a curious sound.

  Case in point: right now she was hearing what sounded like a wailing through the walls. Would she knock on that person’s door and see if they were all right? Certainly not.

  In this way, at least, they were prepared.

  * * *

  In the bathroom, she unbuttoned his shirt, one pearl circle at a time. She thought about Professor Berezniak and her abhorrence of wrinkles. She patted down the soft hair on his sternum. She felt around inside his belly button. She slid off his shirt, right arm and then left, and hung it on a hook. She turned him around. She inspected the mole on his lower back, the scent of his armpits. She raised a hand and examined his oval fingernails; they were impossibly clean.

  She could not find any bruising or lacerations or scars. No evidence at all of his accident, if “accident” was indeed the right word.

  Richard sat on the toilet seat and she trimmed his hair until it was shorn close to the scalp. The bathroom was free of windows. The walls had been painted a nauseating green. It felt to her like a covert space.

  Careful, he kept telling her as she cut. Careful.

  Height brought clarity. That had been one of her father’s sayings. From the top of a skyscraper you could see the shape of a city. From the peak of a mountain, the surrounding land. He had grown up in the Sierra Nevadas and had never liked the flatness of Florida. He felt the absence of elevation interfered with perspective.

  She rubbed a hand over Richard’s head and felt a satisfying prickle.

  He stood and surveyed the fallen hair around his feet, his face flushed and crumpled. He batted at his shoulders with a towel. She peeled off her shirt. Her bra smelled of sweat and sadness. Blood moved at top speed through the tunnels in her body. She handed him the scissors and asked him to make her look less like herself.

  On the toilet, she tried to concentrate on how solid the floor felt under her feet, how cold and hard. She pushed the loose molar. She felt Richard begin to gently collect fistfuls of her brown hair. It was the plainest shade imaginable: not red enough to be auburn, not light enough to be dishwater blond. She did not tell him to be careful. She no longer had any need for care. She swam around in the feeling of his hands moving across her scalp.

  A curious watercolor hung on the wall, just above the light switch. A pair of monstrous charcoal trees grew out of its sky but in reverse: the upper branches were stuck in the clouds, the roots dangling above the earth. Stripes of turquoise and pink and green stretched like contrails across the background, a sunset for the end of the world. A crown of purple had been painted between the trees; it resembled the bottom part of a jaw.

  Richard tapped her shoulder. She looked down at the fur between her breasts. In the mirror, she saw that he had cut her hair very short, with fringed, uneven bangs. Given the way she had been shedding, this felt like a natural end to whatever process her body had been engaged in. The sudden absence of hair had exaggerated her features. Everything looked a little swollen, a little sharp.

  They stood beside each other in the mirror, arms and hips touching. Cut hair ringed their belly buttons, fringed their collarbones. Their bodies looked like weapons. She detected a subtle shift in her husband’s expression, a softening around the eyes and the mouth, an opening up, though the longer she studied their reflections, the more she became unnerved by the thought that those two people were an entirely different couple, trapped inside the glass. She was afraid to move, because if she did and the reflections did not move in synchrony, her suspicion would be confirmed.

  It was Richard who broke their stance, by turning and lifting his shirt from the hook. She was careful to turn at the same time, her eyes averted from the mirror, and then she was facing the watercolor: the painting had been hung upside down, the artists’ initials in the upper corner as opposed to the bottom. Even after she turned the watercolor right side up she could not banish the inverted forest from her mind.

  * * *

  Wait, she said to Richard, before he could put his shirt back on.

  He stopped in the middle of the room. She pulled the curtains across the windows, blotting out the day. She took his shirt from him and draped it over a chair. She held his hands. He stared at her, his eyes goldish, the corners of his mouth twitching. His lips parted and dewed. She tried very hard to not think upsetting thoughts (she had seen this same body on a hospital table, covered to the throat in a white sheet; she was about to lie down with a ghost or a stranger posing as one). She tried to think only of the heat gathering between their palms.

  They collapsed onto the low bed, their skin sticky with hair. She slipped her hands inside his underarms, and then her fingers were sliding across his ribs, over the hard buckle of his belt, down the insides of his thighs. A molten ache announced itself between her legs. Her eyelashes thickened. Her shoulders shook. She was facing away from the door, and if someone was peering through the keyh
ole, she imagined they would seem like a regular couple—the looker would not see the pressure to vomit growing inside her like a demonic pregnancy or the thief cracking apart the bones in her chest with a crowbar, in pursuit of her heart.

  She wished for an invisible third presence in the room, someone who could record everything, so she could later watch the footage and try to understand what had really happened.

  Clare, Richard said, wrapping his hands around her skull. Darling.

  He sat up and pinned her shoulders to the bed. Every nerve was exposed, alight. She started breathing in shallow gulps, so fast she thought she might die too, sending her consciousness to who-knew-where. His lips wet on her neck, the soft press of muscle and vein, the quench of the ache—and afterward, when she curled up naked and began to sob, broken by overness, he lay behind her and held her close as she wept, something he had never done for her in their former life. There was never an invitation, given the way she kept that second, secret self hidden. Given the way she often seemed to feel so little or felt so much her capacity for expression was overwhelmed—when did she decide that if you couldn’t say everything it was better to say nothing at all? Yet this was something he was able to do for her now, in the strangeness of this afterlife.

  * * *

  When she opened the curtains, night had turned the mountains into colossal shadows. She stood naked by the window. She touched the rough spine of hair on the back of her neck. The terrace was no longer empty. It had transformed into a disco, with blue fluorescent lights roaming like search beacons, the music made gentle by distance. People in beige tracksuits were dancing, spotlighted in blue, some in pairs, some gyrating in solitude, unashamed. She had yet to see any visitors in regular clothing and was starting to wonder if she and Richard were the only guests. She thought that this hotel must be offering some kind of cure.