The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  She had been gone for more than two weeks and had not sent so much as an e-mail to her boss. On the road, she checked her voicemail and learned that she was no longer an employee of ThyssenKrupp.

  On the highway she passed signs for the Matanzas State Forest, and she remembered that in the 1700s the British had traded Havana to the Spanish, who had lost control of the capital during the Seven Years’ War, in exchange for Florida—an entire state for a single city.

  She reached the Seahorse at dusk, headlights blazing. The parking lot had been expanded, the attached apartment bulldozed and replaced with a swimming pool, a creepy crawler prowling the concrete bowl. The pool was ringed with reclining beach chairs, each with a white towel folded at the foot. Clare was separated from the pool by a plastic fence, a pair of ponytail palms stationed on either side of the gate, which required a code for entry. The panels were bright white, as though they had just been cleaned. The Seahorse was fifty miles from Georgia, the climate less densely tropical than in other parts of the state, the air sharp with salt and chill. She was running her hands over the plastic fence when a woman stepped outside.

  The pool is for guests only, the woman called out, her hands flapping.

  Clare walked toward the woman, slowly. She wore a striped T-shirt dress and flip-flops, her hair wrapped in a yellow bandana; she looked young, perhaps close to the age Clare’s mother had been when they all moved south from the barrier islands. Clare was still holding the car keys; the moon was darkening into crimson. She did not yet know what she was going to do.

  I would like to be a guest, she heard herself say.

  It was three days before Christmas; there had been a last-minute cancellation. At reception, her mother’s fern collection had been replaced by a pair of white orchids, one on each end of the curved desk.

  Do you live here? Clare asked as the woman created her reservation. She wore tan braces on her wrists. No name tag.

  In Jacksonville Beach? She paused her typing, though she did not look up. The perfect arch of her brows made Clare think of Davi.

  No, Clare said. At the Seahorse.

  Sometimes it feels that way.

  Clare didn’t say anything back. Finally the woman looked up.

  I’m off at midnight, she said. I live in Lakeside.

  She went on to tell Clare that she was glad she didn’t work the overnight, because those were always the people who got fired. Too many long stretches of aloneness and quiet; it became easy to forget you were being watched. One employee had been caught masturbating, though he claimed to have been sleepwalking and was therefore not responsible; another had been caught making prank calls. The woman pointed to a ceiling corner. Clare turned around and saw a small security camera staring back.

  Did you get into an accident? Clare asked, pointing at the braces on her wrists.

  The mob got me, she said.

  I’m sorry?

  Kidding! The woman slipped a key card into an envelope. I have carpel tunnel. I’m writing an epic novel, and it’s hell on the joints.

  She had the look of someone who had spent a lot of time in physical discomfort: a certain tightness in the jaw, a pinch in the shoulders. Clare asked her what she thought she might get caught doing, if she had to work the overnights.

  I don’t want to know, the woman said back.

  The hallways were still open-air. The walls had been stripped of the cobalt floral wallpaper and painted a tasteful beige. The carpet had been replaced, and the comforter was different too, patterned with red hibiscuses as opposed to lemons and tangerines. The hibiscuses gave the entire room a little too much flush, like over-rouged cheeks. She checked the corners for dead wasps, which more than one TripAdvisor reviewer had complained about, and found none. She counted some small updates in the bathroom: the faucet, the showerhead. The blow-dryer was a different model. Her parents lived not ten miles away and she wondered if they ever came back to witness this particular evidence of time passing.

  On the bedside table, the phone rang twice and then went silent.

  She set her bags on one of the double beds. She stared at the blank TV. The air in the room felt as still as a freshly departed body, though it was a myth that a dead body was still. Enzymes were digesting membranes; blood cells were sinking into capillaries like tiny deflated rafts, remaking the color of the skin; soft tissues were transforming into gases. She tried to lie down on the unoccupied double bed and on the floor and in the bathtub. She went searching for fingernails and found a business card for a scuba-diving outfit and ate it like a goat.

  She looked out the window. The parking lot was illuminated, a curious light cast down from the sky.

  * * *

  In the last months of her father’s life, his worst hours would come at nightfall. He would point at a blank wall and cower. He would say that people were living behind the plaster and soon they would be coming to take him away. By then she had moved in with her parents, where she planned to stay until the end. On occasion, she would lock herself in the bathroom and turn on the shower and open her father’s notebook. Each time, she felt a blast of volcanic air so dense she thought the molecules were going to arrange themselves into hands and strangle her. Each time, she read a little bit more. You were an off-putting child, to strangers. At the inn guests always seemed startled to see you. I remember this one couple who called you Little Miss Ghost. She taped Ellis Martin’s card to the back of the notebook. She practiced dialing the number. She knew he would have wanted her to activate his plan—the plan he would now have no memory of—months ago.

  She did not take a single photo during these months. She was terrified of what she might see.

  Clare and her father would watch TV through the night; it was the only thing that helped him calm. She would rub the parched skin on his hands, examine the blue branches of artery and vein, the Bobtails asleep in a ring around them. Did the cats know? She trimmed his fingernails. She hated it when her own nails inched past the quick; it made her feel as though her whole life was growing out of order. She read an article about suicide tourism. She read an article about Patricia Highsmith and learned she was an alcoholic who brought pet snails to parties. She copied a few quotes into an e-mail and sent it to the Third Hotel, Isa’s name in the subject line, knowing it could take days to reach her. She considered what her simultaneous possibilities might be up to—one had walked out into the night and never returned, forged a different path into the unforgivable; in another, her father was already dead.

  She told herself anything was possible in the present tense.

  She would smell his soggy tartness, the scent of a soul in decline. If a horror movie was on TV, she skipped right over it, because watching someone die slowly—and at the same time all too quickly—beside you was horror enough.

  Sports, he would say, and she would go to sports.

  News, he would say a little while later, and she would go there.

  Sports, he would say, and she would go back.

  Where you have been? he would say, and she would tell him, Right here.

  No, where you have been? he would say.

  I have worked very hard at being nowhere and now I’m right here.

  Sports, he would say, and she was already there.

  * * *

  Outside the moon had turned gold and red and enormous. It looked like a freshly born planet; it looked like it was sinking down to earth, like it would soon be close enough to touch. A wind roughed up palm trees, pushed a lost sheet of paper across the parking lot. As she passed the reception office, she glimpsed through a window the woman watching a Christmas parade on a small TV and filing her nails.

  Clare crossed the road, in the direction of the ocean. You had to be careful at this crossing. No traffic lights, and the cars blew by at blistering speeds, having seemingly sprung from nowhere. As a child, she had once almost been hit by a car. On the opposite side of the road, she turned to look at the Seahorse; the pool gleamed like a gemstone. She felt like her hear
t was outside her body, beating just above her head.

  By the Atlantic the moon was even more monstrous: crimson and swollen and aching with power. A sharp wind stirred the sand. The waves crashed. A cold spray blasted her skin. She watched the darkness spread out before her; she thought of the hero standing at the tunnel gate. The night air set a fire in her throat. She took off down the dark beach. She ran and she screamed.

  * * *

  In New Scotland, in the first days of the new year, Clare would take the reel to a film specialist at the university, a bespectacled man in a sweater vest. When he asked how the water damage had occurred, she would remember hoisting the backpack over her head in the river and she would say, There was an accident. She would not tell him that her husband had used the cinematic condition to investigate her, to build a case. She would not tell him that this was the body of evidence he had gathered and she wanted a verdict. The specialist would require her to leave the reel, so he could attempt to scan the frames. A week would pass. She would meet once more with Detectives Winter and Hall, who would tell her that all forensic evidence suggested the hit-and-run had been an accident. They had made no progress on finding the driver, however. In this way, the case was both solved and unsolved, settled and ongoing.

  Nothing is settled, she would want to tell them. Everything is still ongoing.

  When she met with the specialist again, he would tell her that the film was unrecoverable: the water had made the base separate from the emulsion; the images were fatally degraded. This man had known Richard and after he said the word “fatally” aloud, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He would refer Clare to an expert in Manhattan, and that person would offer the same prognosis. Apparently her attempt to dry the film had only made matters worse.

  Once something is underwater it should stay there, the second specialist would say.

  * * *

  One night Clare tried to answer her father’s question—where have you been? She talked softly as the TV played. She felt as though her blood had been replaced by static electricity. By the time I stop, she told herself, a decision will have been made. She would not know how to begin, there was no way to begin, but she would begin, she had to begin, and when she did she would have no patience for chronology, for putting things in order, and so she would start at the end or at the beginning, with her return to the Seahorse and the thrashing ocean and the moon, my god, the moon. She would say that she hoped to never see a moon like that again—oh, it had been an evil thing in the sky. When her father blinked and asked his daughter to describe this moon, this evil moon, she would take his hands and the air around her would vibrate, and she would go quiet for a moment because he was listening, he was right here, and she knew this was the last time such a miracle might ever occur.

  * * *

  That night the moon looked like it was going to kill them all.

  RESEARCH NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Revolución Zombi was inspired by the film Juan de los Muertos, directed by Alejandro Brugués and considered by many to be Cuba’s first nonanimated horror movie (for animated horror, check out the excellent ¡Vampiros en La Habana!). Aspects of Revolución Zombi loosely follow the premise of Juan de los Muertos; other details have been invented. The cast and crew of Revolución Zombi are wholly fictional and are not in any way intended to resemble the living artists who brought Juan de los Muertos to the screen.

  During my work on The Third Hotel, I turned to a number of texts, many of which left their mark on my own pages: Cuban Cinema, by Michael Chanan; Men, Women, and Chain Saws, by Carol J. Clover; Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston; Zombies: A Cultural History, by Roger Luckhurst; Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, by Kendall R. Phillips; The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant; American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Walker; Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema, by Gustavo Subero; Cuba from Columbus to Castro, by Jaime Suchlicki; The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, by Julia Cooke; Havana, by Mark Kurlansky; Married to the Mouse, by Richard Foglesong; Women and Tourism: Invisible Hosts, Invisible Guests, by Mary Fillmore; ¡Cubanísimo! The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature, ed. Cristina García; Hotel, by Joanna Walsh; Ways of Seeing, by John Berger; “Examining the Norse Mythology and the Archetype of Odin: The Inception of Grand Tour,” by Maximiliano E. Korstanje (Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Journal 60, no. 4, December 2012); “Mapping Urban Horror,” ed. Zachary Price (Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, March 7, 2016); and A Planet for Rent, by Yoss. The mention of the 2 + 2 = 5 graffiti signature is a reference to the artist Fabian Lopez. The Gerry Canavan quote comes from “Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost: Zombies and Zombis in Firefly/Serenity and Dollhouse” (Science Fiction Film and Television 4, no. 2, Autumn 2011: 173–203); The film description on pages 77–78 is from Les Revenants. I’m also grateful to Paloma Duong’s scholarship, in particular her lecture “The Commodification of Culture and the Cultural Life of Commodities in the New Cuba,” delivered at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, where I first encountered the idea of screens as “vehicles for the subjective.” This novel also found early inspiration in Jean Echenoz’s novel Piano and Julio Cortázar’s short story “Blow Up.”

  I’m grateful to the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, Bard College, and the Writers’ Room of Boston for the space and time. Thank you to Larry Rohter for the early reading suggestions. Thank you to everyone I met in Havana for their generosity, time, and conversation. Thank you to Shuchi Saraswat for the writing dates. Thank you to Garth Greenwell for the early support. Thank you to Elliott Holt, Lauren Groff, and Mike Scalise for their editorial guidance and encouragement. Mike, extra thanks for the title.

  All my thanks to Chloe Texier-Rose, Sarah Scire, Sarahmay Wilkinson, Jackson Howard, Debra Helfand, Rachel Weinick, Frieda Duggan, Abby Kagan, Amber Hoover, and Devon Mazzone at FSG. And thank you to Sarah Gerton and Olivia Simkins at Curtis Brown. It is a privilege to work with all of you.

  Emily Bell and Katherine Fausset—you two are the dream team that makes everything possible. Thank you to infinity and back.

  Thank you to my family.

  Thank you to Paul—for everything, always.

  ALSO BY LAURA VAN DEN BERG

  What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

  The Isle of Youth

  Find Me

  A Note About the Author

  Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novel Find Me. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Born and raised in Florida, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and dog. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Part 1: The Fingernail

  Part 2: Morbid Urges

  Part 3: Laws Unknown

  Research Notes and Acknowledgments

  Also by Laura van den Berg

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  175 Varick Street, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Laura van den Berg

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2018

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71497-0

  Interior art by Sarahmay Wilkinson

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