Every now and then, through the years, his interest would bubble over when he spied a dog digging in an out-of-the-way patch of ground, so that he could hardly contain himself. He would wait for hours sometimes, hoping the dog might suddenly disappear into the earth.
He’d also wondered if there might be special times of the year for other animals, which had heretofore gone unrecognized by the human world. Cat days and mouse days. And maybe they had places of their own, lives human beings knew nothing about, seasons and cycles and natural rhythms that affected humans, even though humans took no notice of their effects. Maybe there were realms of birds, empires of ants, counties of rabbits, kingdoms of cats. Bat weeks and months for deer. Who could know? Sometimes it seemed only human beings, with their all-too-unfocused lives, their chronic social awkwardness, had no calendrical dominion they might call their own.
These were the thoughts of a man suffering from too much heat, he supposed. No new guests had arrived, the past few days, and those who were already buried within the walls of the Deadfall appeared to have become more deeply buried still. He imagined them sitting naked in their rooms, their usually hidden deformities at home in the shadows, occasionally getting up to gulp cool air down by the grates in the floor.
The Deadfall’s cooling system appeared to work well enough. Despite the heat outside, it was possible to sleep the night through, if that’s what you wanted to do. Jacob had told him that sections of the upper level lacked air conditioning, but that these rooms were by special request only, this time of year. He couldn’t imagine it. Even the relatively cool Deadfall interior held pockets of cooked, pressurized air. Sometimes he would be sitting, thinking idly, and it was as if the ideas adhered to the stale air around him – for hours he might watch their afterimages float languidly about his head.
A few weeks earlier Jacob had informed him that the time was fast approaching for the Deadfall’s more or less comprehensive biannual cleaning.
“Now, please remain calm. There is no need for panic,” Jacob had told him. “We’ll be hiring what local crew we can obtain, and I have a list of past laborers who will travel this far out just for the money we will be paying them. All you have to do is provide a little supervision, and keep them out of those rooms, and floors, where they do not belong, or for some reason we do not wish to be cleaned.” Richard understood there was a fund available for such work, but Jacob had never bothered to reveal its source.
Richard hadn’t thought any more about it – maybe because it seemed too much to think about, a cleaning task beyond any he could imagine, particularly during the hottest, most miserable time of the year – and why choose this time of year in any case? – until one morning, when Jacob off-handedly informed him he’d already made all the arrangements, and that the workers would be arriving that afternoon. Well, let the old man do what he wanted. He couldn’t be responsible for the consequences. He couldn’t even think clearly. If things continued like this, soon he’d be seeing Serena’s invisible fetuses and embryos himself.
AT LUNCH TIME, Richard went into the kitchens to ask Enid if she would make him a sandwich. Serena liked making her own (no self-respecting cook would serve up such unattractive combinations), and part of the fun for her was taking the sandwich somewhere she didn’t belong and curling up with a book to read and eat, dripping unidentifiable juices on book, clothing, carpeting and furniture. He’d decided not to stop her – you had to choose your battles, and Jacob didn’t seem to mind. Besides, the secret army of housekeepers always had things spotless by the next morning, and he had never received any notes of complaint.
He really should learn to make his own sandwiches, he thought, but he wouldn’t be able to top Enid’s wonderful lunches in a hundred years, so why bother? And she obviously thought fixing him lunch was just part of her job.
He walked in to find Enid packing utensils and gear into two large canvas bags. Her son stood impassively nearby, suitcases hanging from each hand. He blinked acknowledgement in Richard’s direction, but said nothing.
“You’re not leaving us, are you?” he asked her, unsuccessfully trying to keep alarm out of his voice.
“I always leave during The Big Cleaning,” she replied, “go down to spend some time with my sister. Besides, I just can’t abide this heat! I’ll be back by the first snow. This is the slow season; didn’t Jacob tell you?”
Richard thought that the hotel always seemed to be a bit on the slow side, but he said nothing. It wasn’t his place. “I would have thought you’d want to stick around, make sure they didn’t mess up your kitchens.”
“Hmpf. They do what Jacob says. It’s all down on that list of his, been done the same way for decades, way before he came. He never asks for my input. He probably can’t – asking for my input isn’t on the list, I bet.”
“What about the housekeepers? Do they help out, or do they go away as well?”
“The housekeepers… do what they do, that’s all anybody can say. We don’t interact. Now, you have a good couple of months, and take good care of that sweet child of yours.”
She nodded at her son, picked up the bags, and they left. Her saying “sweet child” had been an unexpected and endearing gift.
WHEN THE WORKERS pulled up to the hotel in assorted pickups, vans, rusted Volkswagen Bugs, and stripped-down and sloppily-puttied old Cadillacs, Richard was ready for them. He’d prepared a rough map of the hotel, breaking it down into areas and assigning so many workers to each area, accompanied by a specific list of tasks. That had required some occasionally puzzling input from Jacob. The full meaning of such tasks as ‘wrap the yellow vase at the end of the hall in #14 copper wire’ and ‘dip the fringe of the triangular area rug with the red cat pattern into a solution of 3 parts graphite and 1 part lemon juice, but under no circumstances do the same to the similar rug with the green cat pattern’ was not immediately apparent.
“So what does this one mean? ‘Stand with your back to the closet door while rubbing two ounces of butter on the back side of the lower right-hand door frame.’”
Jacob studied the note on the map, hastily scribbled in his own handwriting, and said, “You had best obtain someone unusually limber for this particular task. I saw a couple of tall young men; perhaps one of them will do.”
“So what does it mean?”
“I have no idea, Richard.”
“Terrific.”
“That is simply the way it has always been done. I received those instructions from the manager before me; now I’m giving them to you. There are rituals about these things, precautions to take, restrictions to be respected. It has all been passed down.”
“I just wonder how I’m going to remember all this when you aren’t here anymore.”
“You just will. I did. You’ll find you have to.”
But the nature of the Deadfall seemed increasingly unreal and arbitrary, something to be memorized, to deal with ritualistically, to be accepted as a matter of faith. Working on that map made it clear how confused Richard’s sense of the hotel’s structure actually was. He thought he knew where most of the rooms were by now, and their relationship to the various central architectural features – halls, chimneys, and staircases – but once he started diagramming them, the pieces didn’t all fit.
It appeared impossible to capture the hotel on paper. Rooms were either larger or smaller than they should have been, and the separate pieces of the hotel seemed incapable of forming a coherent whole. Chimneys did not flow unbroken from floor to floor as they should have. Tracing one such chimney all the way up from the basement, Richard discovered that it took several impossible jogs, changing its position a full ten feet from floor two to floor three (as well as the type of brick from which it had been constructed) and in no way matching the apparently corresponding chimney leaning precariously from one side of the Deadfall’s roof. He had similar problems making sense of the construction of staircases, and the arrangement of pipes and ductwork moving between rooms and floors was an impossib
le tangle.
“We have to clean all the ducts somehow,” Jacob muttered in passing. “I shudder to imagine all that might be growing inside them.”
Richard got the bright idea of attaching a long cord to a heavy wheel taken from a toy wagon, and tossing that down the ducts to see where it might lead. He could hear it clanging in the metal shafts for a long time, bouncing off walls, taking long drops. Then silence. Then the cord burned its entire length through his hands, the whole of it disappearing into the dark mouth of the duct. Every few hours he would hear it in some distant wall, or rattling the boards under his feet, or making a brief appearance at the bottom of a toilet bowl before disappearing again.
He and Jacob tried to pay the smaller workers to climb into the ducts with a sponge, a bucket, and a net, but they got no takers at any price. Finally they decided to clean the best they could with mop heads attached to long limber poles, and leave it at that.
The used mop heads were dumped into a pile by the driveway. Now and then Richard would prod it with one of the long poles. There was always some arousal of movement, and tiny things scuttled or slithered out of the pile into the tall grass. Once Richard had read a book all about house mites, how they fed on tiny flakes of human skin, how millions of them lived in even the cleanest of houses. He imagined those mites nourished in the perfect environment, and magnified hundreds of times. Deadfall mites.
House mites were not something he could ever have talked to Abby about. Someone looking into their house from the outside might have called her a meticulous housekeeper. But the word he would have used was ‘frightened.’ She was frightened of dirt, not just because she was afraid that people would judge her on the basis of her housecleaning, or that she would be a bad mother if she didn’t maintain a filth-free environment for her child (although she believed both of these things), but because of what she couldn’t see, and of what she didn’t know.
“There are things in dirt,” was all she would say about it. He thought of the vigor with which she wiped everything down before the baby Serena was permitted into a room, and the way she studied newspaper stories having to do with disease and freak accidents as if they were biblical texts, and the constant journeys she made to the doctors, and how she tried every new remedy on the market until cautioning newspaper stories kept her away from medicines and chemicals of any kind for a while.
Chemicals, molecules, microbes – all bits of the unseen world were like ghosts to her. They haunted her to distraction.
He’d sometimes wondered if it had something to do with the baby – not Serena, but the one who hadn’t made it. The one she’d been told was dying in her womb after six months, and then was dead, and had to be pulled out like a bad tooth. Abby had been a woman who couldn’t even say the words fetus, or embryo. Early in her pregnancy, she’d sat up in bed one night and said, “There’s a secret growing inside me.” He’d switched on the light, expecting to see a silly smile on her face, but she hadn’t been smiling at all.
He didn’t think she should see it, but she’d insisted, and she said it looked like a dark doll, like an unfinished sculpture, and she had been right. But then she had said it couldn’t be human, its fingers weren’t right and she was sure there had been claws, and that the doctors had planted this thing inside her, and she’d never been pregnant at all. They’d had to sedate her, and he’d gone home alone to drink and cry all night.
Embryos and fetuses. For the past two years, Serena’s interest in babies had remained constant. She clipped their pictures from magazines and hung them on her wall. When she tired of talking about babies, then she talked about animal babies instead, which she might always have access to, which she could hold. So unlike her mother, she had no fear of small, hidden things, even the things that smelled, crawled, and bit. But Richard had never told her about the older brother she’d almost had.
JACOB ASSIGNED RICHARD the task of inspecting the cleaned areas of the hotel.
“Don’t you think you should do that? I mean, I’d like to make the rounds with you to see what I can learn, but that’s my point – I don’t know enough about what’s right, what’s wrong. Christ, I hardly know what’s up or down, left or right in the Deadfall yet.”
Jacob looked harried, his normally neatly-combed hair sticking up in all directions, his belt askew, cuffs spotted with black dust. “I appreciate that,” he said, distractedly, “but I can’t really take the time right now, and I do believe it might be beneficial if you were to examine the hotel with new eyes, without the influence of my observations.”
“So you’re teaching me to swim by just throwing me into the water.”
“A bit of an exaggeration, but if you wish. Necessity is the great teacher, and all that.”
In Richard’s experience, there had always been some buildings that looked huge on the outside but proved cramped and impossible to navigate inside. In turn, smaller-looking structures appeared to go on forever for those taking a first-time tour.
He’d noticed it from the beginning, but today underscored the impression: the Deadfall managed to be too big both outside and in. From the outside, the main building resembled one of those grand old mansions from the South, with large white columns framing the enormous hard-carved front doors. The columns supported an elaborately sculpted porch roof two stories off the ground, and small windows like peepholes had been carved out of the wall above the doors in an arc. On either side of the columns were the great front windows, four to a floor, running practically floor to ceiling to maximize light and impressiveness.
Out of this central bulk the wings spread, in smaller blocks that stepped back from the main building at random angles, following the slope and irregularities of the hillside, so that the farther from the front doors the structure went, groping for stability, the more chaotic (and less elegant) it became, and the natural stresses of gravity pulled walls and framing out of alignment, until you arrived at the last segment, which should have been condemned. In fact, many sections were boarded up and isolated from the rest of the hotel.
Richard thought the Deadfall looked not so much constructed as landed, the body of some great creature fallen to ground and into its final resting place.
He had been assembling a rough interior map of the hotel since his first few days here, surprised that one didn’t already exist. (“Every new manager starts one,” Jacob explained. “But all eventually quit the enterprise. You will, too, I assure you.”) Richard’s map was now several sheets taped together, walls drawn with pencil, erased, and redrawn, arrows used to indicate geometries that made no logical sense.
He did the main structure first, which was straightforward enough, although he did have trouble in the southeast corner of the third floor, where one room featured a closet within a closet within a closet, the final closet leading him out to the middle of the second floor hall, with no sensation of having descended. He entered a number on the sheet for each room or hall, described its location as best he could, added notations regarding closets, private baths, and similar utility spaces, and attempted some critique of the cleanliness (‘Floors spotless, ceiling could use some work, mirror over the fireplace filthy, or severely corroded’).
Sometimes he caught a glimpse of residents (gray flesh, curled claw, balding, rash-eaten head) as they quickly entered a closet or hid behind a curtain while he made his inspections. This always embarrassed him, even made him feel slightly ashamed of himself. Many residents didn’t let him in at all, of course, and these he duly noted and went on his way. Jacob had told him that a number of them chose to travel during the annual cleaning period, and in their rooms Richard often found personal possessions awaiting their owners’ return: odd, unshapely garments, twisted bits of toys, elaborate wrappings, ornate brushes and combs, scissors, and other grooming devices of unimaginable purpose. There were also pets in covered cages whose plaintive, ominous cries he decided it best to ignore.
The wings proved more difficult, as he had expected. The halls seldom followed
straight lines, and the twists, turns, and doublings back made him abandon his descriptions of location in favor of relative descriptions (‘eighteen steps down the hall from the previous door’). Ceiling heights were unpredictable, so that sometimes he had to crouch and other times, while there was too little light to tell him the ceiling’s height, he knew it was some distance because he could hear things flying up there.
Furnishings also varied greatly in the wings. In some rooms he had to walk over the tops of beds and sideboards just to reach the other side. Others were completely bare of furniture, even though the room was still occupied (‘coughs and throat clearings from the closet suggesting more than one guest’).
At the end of three days, Richard had gotten up to 232 on his numbered list, and couldn’t really tell how much more he had to do. This confusion of scope was further complicated when he discovered he had somehow skipped a string of rooms – as many as twenty doors – from the first day’s inspections. His map was falling apart from pencil corrections and arrowed notations, indecipherable worn and smudged sections, torn bits from anxious handling.
After a week with no clear end in sight, Jacob stopped him in the hall. “Perhaps it’s time for a rest. Do the rooms appear to be being cleaned, or at least dealt with?”
Richard nodded wearily.
“Then so be it. Go spend some time with your daughter.”
ONE OF THE cleaning crew found the thing. The jittery old fellow brought a bucket of red paint over and set it down where Richard and Jacob were standing. At first its only movement was a slow, wet, explosion of breath, and with everything tucked in so, it resembled a heart pulled out of somebody’s chest, still determinedly beating. He looked over at Jacob, thinking, explain this one, will you please? Then he noticed the edges of dark fur beneath the red paint and just for a moment tried to remember if there were any creatures with fur on the inside, then thinking werewolf, of course, he amazingly felt as if he were back on known, comfortable ground, and tried to smile at Jacob as if to say, See how I’ve adjusted? But Jacob continued to stare down at the heart now thrashing around, now spinning like a fur-covered top, now screeching through the goopey layers of blood-red latex enamel.
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