by Will Wiles
“Voided.”
“Voided, yes, rescinded.”
“I paid for all three days.”
“Yes, sir, and there’s an instruction here to refund you if requested. Should I go ahead and action that?”
“Yes. No!” That was to accept the verdict. And Adam might see the refund and would wonder what was going on. “Does it say why it’s been voided?”
“Conduct contrary to Meetex’s terms and conditions.”
“What? How?”
“It doesn’t say, sir.” I could infer from Fran’s Arctic tone that she was busily imagining the worst—a full-frontal nude streak down the main axis of the MetaCenter, a fist-fight during a health and safety roundtable, an all-comers orgy in the Gray Labyrinth. “You endorsed the terms and conditions as part of the billing process.”
“What can I do to get my pass restored?” I said. “I have a job to do, I need to get back to the conference.”
“It’s not something I can action over the phone, sir. We can refund your remaining days, and you can write or email . . .”
“You know that’ll never get seen in time,” I said. This was charitable: I was entirely certain they would just ignore any letter or email from me. “Is there any way I can get it sorted out right now?”
“Sir, I can’t do that, not over the phone,” Fran said.
“But if I was there in person, at the MetaCenter, you might be able to do something?”
“We’re not based at the MetaCenter, sir . . .”
“Then who do I talk to?”
“If you send an email . . .”
I felt, as a very distinct physical sensation, a burst of foul language form in my throat and soft palate—and I stifled it. There would be no aggressive behavior. I would calmly and assertively make my reasonable case.
“Can I speak with Tom Laing, please?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’d like to speak to Tom Laing. The event director. Could you put me through to him, please?”
“I can’t reach him from here, sir . . . If you email . . .”
I gritted my teeth. “It’s fine. I understand. He’s still at the MetaCenter, right? I’ll go there myself and get this dealt with. Thank you so much for your help, you have completely transformed the situation for me.”
“Sir—”
I put the phone down on Fran’s closing remarks. She was useless to me. No doubt she wasn’t even directly employed by Meetex, but by a customer-relations contractor, defying time zones in a shed off another motorway, maybe in Europe, maybe in Hyderabad or Chennai. She might as well have been a push-button answer tree. In five or ten years those jobs will be replaced by voice-recognition algorithms. Dealing with her wasn’t going to get me anywhere, and it wasn’t her fault. She was there to deflect awkward customers away from the company itself, not to deal with them. It was all an illusion; doors painted onto a solid façade. No central exchange, just a labyrinth of dead ends in which my complaint would be left to expire. I had to find the event director and address this directly.
In the bathroom, I poured a glass of water, drank it, and poured another. The second was properly cold, cold enough to hurt my teeth. Pipes in frozen earth. In the mirror above the sink, I saw with a shock that I was still wearing the Way Inn baseball cap. My mind had been elsewhere. I took it off, threw it on the bed, and left the room.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the young man at reception said. He was another twentysomething, similar to the one who had followed me back to my room the first time my keycard failed to work. His name badge said John-Paul.
Afternoon already—time was getting on. “Good afternoon,” I said. “Neil Double, room 219. There seems to be a problem with the clock radio in my room—it keeps making strange noises, picking up interference from somewhere.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir, we’ll send someone up to take a look at it,” John-Paul said, with perhaps the faintest touch of a French accent. He referred to his screen, tapping at the keyboard. “Room 219 . . . Right, no problem.”
“Thanks,” I said. I hesitated. “There’s just one room 219, isn’t there?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Is there more than one room 219? Last night, I must have been confused by the layout upstairs, because I got the impression there was more than one room 219.”
John-Paul smiled sympathetically. “Oh no, sir, there’s just the one room 219—it really would be too confusing if we started doubling up room numbers.” His eyes darted back to his screen, which must have been a valuable source of intelligence on the man—me—who had raised this unusual issue. I hoped my years of loyal patronage of the Way Inn group, my My Way member status and superb credit record balanced out the impression that I was a street-corner ranter. “Apparently you had trouble with your keycard last night—it was reencoded a couple of minutes after half three in the morning. You see, sometimes the keycards . . .”
“Yes, yes, you explained this to me yesterday. Your colleague did.”
“Ah, yes! Well, that should account for it, yes? You had the right room, but your card had lost its, its . . .”
“Mojo,” I supplied.
“Mojo, precisely.” John-Paul seemed very pleased with this whole exchange. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“Uh, yes,” I said. I threw a glance to the main entrance—there was no bus waiting there. I didn’t want to imply that I might have been barred from the conference. It made me feel so disreputable, and I resented being made to feel that way. “How do I walk to the MetaCenter?”
“There’s a free shuttle-bus to the MetaCenter, sir, it leaves from right outside the main entrance every ten or twenty minutes.”
“I know, but I’d like to walk instead.”
This seemed to perturb John-Paul far more profoundly than my hypothesis about the existence of a duplicate room 219.
“The trouble is that they haven’t finished building the skywalk yet, I’m afraid, so there is no direct pedestrian link to the MetaCenter.”
I smiled confidently, hoping to dispel any hint that I was deterred by this, and was instead relishing the prospect of a bracing stroll. “Yes, I know, but there must be an indirect route, yes? At ground level? Along the same roads as the bus drives?”
In the course of this exchange, John-Paul’s front desk colleague had turned to eavesdrop. He now turned to her and they shared a look of concern. She shrugged and shook her head, combined tiny actions that resembled a shudder at the thought of traversing the terrain around the Way Inn on foot, an articulate but wordless answer to an unspoken question. John-Paul returned his attention to me, a quite distressing lost look in his eyes, a man who had been forced beyond the bounds of anticipated and role-played customer-service routines.
“Most people come by car,” he said. “Or the airport shuttle. Or taxi.”
“Fine, taxi, right,” I said. I didn’t believe that it was so unthinkable to walk to the MetaCenter, but I could put that aside for the time being. “Could you call me a taxi?”
“Certainly, Mr. Double,” John-Paul said, patently pleased to be back on familiar territory. “Where to?”
“The MetaCenter.”
“The Met—right.” He picked up his phone receiver and stretched out his free hand to indicate the expanse of sofas and armchairs behind me. “Please, take a seat, I’ll let you know when it gets here.” And he gave me an immense smile, as if intending to use it as a kind of firehose of sunshine that would propel me away from the desk and into a chair.
I didn’t need the encouragement. I relished these little periods of enforced relaxation. The time was approaching half twelve. A client (or multiple clients) had asked for a summary of a presentation which started at 2 p.m. There would be a multitude of taxis in the area—the airport was a guarantee of that. So there was time enough to have a reasonable conversation with the event director and get my pass restored. And the fact that I was travelling to the MetaCenter independently, circumventing t
heir petty bus-ban, gave me great satisfaction. Did Laing expect me to simply accept defeat and go home, or sulk in my hotel room until it was time to go to the next conference? He had underestimated my determination. I was not dependent on their transport; I was in command of my situation, and I was going to calmly assert my rights. This ban was a monstrous overreaction and it would surely be reversed.
The wait was also high-grade hotel time, an opportunity to really enjoy the lobby, which was after all designed for this purpose. It felt good to be performing the appropriate rite in the appropriate venue, especially an underrated venue like a hotel reception. True, it was a space to be passed through, not a space to really be in, to inhabit or somehow make significant. Not a place to labor or decide or worship or build or fall in love, or whatever acts we are supposed to perform in other, more authentic, places. But what made those other places so special? So here I was, waiting for a taxi in the lobby of a chain hotel on a motorway. Daily newspapers were laid out for my appreciation, and I appreciated the courtesy without feeling the need to pick any of them up. I might, if time permitted, order a coffee, brewed—with pride, according to a sign—by a global franchise. I was not carving a turkey on Christmas day or writing a sonnet or casting a bowl on a potter’s wheel—and while those activities might be more enjoyable and memorable than my present occupation, were they really any more authentic? This ranking of places baffled me. I was still human, still engaged in a task. I do not know if I possess such a thing as a soul, but if I do, I do not imagine that it deserts me when I arrive at the business hotel, the convention center, the airport terminal. So these places were bland, all alike and unmemorable. There was value to deliberately forgettable environments. They were efficient, spiritually thrifty, requiring little heed and little mindfulness. They were hygienic in that way, aseptic. Nothing from them would linger with you.
Besides, I believed it possible that I had fallen in love while in a hotel lobby. It was in the lobby of the Way Inn in Doha, Qatar, where I had first seen the red-haired woman. We had not spoken then—there was no way we could have—but something had happened to establish her in my mind. Not falling in love, but something; a moment of alchemy, the recognition—instant, spontaneous, total recognition—that she stood apart from the thousands of people I saw in a year, even from those I took to bed, even those (a smaller set still) I actually liked.
From where I sat—the stiff leather creaking in the new chair—the Way Inn promotional stand was in my eyeline, its pair of perky brand agents accosting passersby with door-hangers and a glossy corporate video repeating itself on the two large flat-screen TVs mounted on a framework behind the table. An Asian woman takes a sip from a crystalline glass of water—sunshine lens-flare through the glass—and kicks off her high-heel shoes to sit mermaid-style on a bed. A patrician gray-haired gentleman checks out with nothing more than a flash of his My Way card; staff beam in joy at his benediction and he boards a waiting taxi as a plane passes low over the white hotel behind him. A flash of fire from a wok and a blond woman is delighted by the grilled king prawns that are placed on her plate on a skewer. A Germanic man on a bar stool takes off his steel-framed glasses and laughs with suited colleagues over bottled Mexican beer. A black man in shirt sleeves points to an animated graph projected onto a screen and his colleagues around a boardroom table lean back and converse with obvious satisfaction. Night-lit fountains, Eiffel Tower behind them, are reflected in a sliding glass door as a young couple enter a hotel, hand in hand. We zoom out from a gray-and-white globe being steadily covered in a rash of red markers. The hotel’s corporate logo, that coiled W, fills the screen before receding to form part of the words WAY INN EVERYWHERE.
I must have watched the same loop of images ten or fifteen times. And here I was, living the promo dream, enjoying the facilities of a Way Inn, so the video pleased me. It seemed like a celebration that I could share in. But after the tenth or fifteenth viewing, I saw that in each clip in the sequence, one of the hotel’s abstract paintings appeared. On the subsequent couple of repeats of the film, I watched for that detail in particular. My initial suspicion proved correct—it wasn’t just a painting in each scene, it was the same painting in each scene, two fields of different shades of umber separated by a serpentine boundary, with a oval patch of a paler loamy color in a lower corner. Was this on purpose? It was hard to tell which possibility was more difficult to believe: that the same painting had recurred by accident, or that care had been taken to use the same one each time. Perhaps the video was shot on a series of purpose-built sets in the same location, and the set dressers had only the one painting to use. Or were the paintings more alike than I had imagined? The red-haired woman had said they were all unique—deranged she might be, but I was ready to state with confidence that on this subject her derangement made her an authority whose word could be trusted.
Once seen, this quirk in the video could not be unseen. I shifted in my seat in an effort to exclude the screens from my field of vision, then moved to another armchair so I had my back to them. Still, I turned the apparent coincidence over in my mind, feeling its weight and the questions attached to it. Its defiance of easy answers made me want to simply turn away from it, as I had turned away from the screens. Just as I wanted to do with the obstinate memory of the woman meditating in a sunlit courtyard at 3 a.m. This—how to even describe it?—this vision had been very real to me and my recollection of it was rich in detail when so many other aspects of the previous evening were smudged in retrospect. It had all the qualities of a lucid dream—not that I was familiar with lucid dreams, but this had been lucid, and it must have been a dream, so those were the most important points covered. I had exhausted myself running through the hotel and had slipped briefly into oblivion. My subconscious had obligingly furnished me with a bit of wish fulfillment, the wish being my devout longing to see the red-haired woman again. At some point I regained my wits and returned to my room. The neutral corridors of the hotel had proven ideal for masking the edge of sleep, making it possible to cross the boundary between reality and unreality without noticing. In her sleepwalking, she herself had shown this to be possible. This was the rational palisade I built around what I had seen in the courtyard.
“Mr. Double?” It was John-Paul, calling across the lobby.
“Yes?” I answered him from the chair, then stood to approach him at the front desk.
Perplexity was written across his face. “There’s a problem with the taxi, Mr. Double.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. They can’t find the hotel.”
“What? How come?”
“They can’t find it. On sat nav. It’s not showing up.”
I frowned. “How can that be?”
“Well, this is a new hotel—in fact this whole area is new, the street, the motorway spur, everything. And sat nav hasn’t caught up yet, the software hasn’t been updated. The access roads from the motorway junction do appear, but they all share a postal code, so they appear as a single road, not two parallel roads.”
“So what?” I said. “He can still get here, can’t he?”
John-Paul swallowed. I think my face was already set in a cast of thunderous disbelief, and he seemed apprehensive.
“As I say, the sat nav considers the access road serving the hotels and the access road serving the MetaCenter to be the same road. And apparently that means they can’t put the route into the sat nav, because it sees the point of departure and the destination as being the same place, a journey of zero miles, which they can’t log for fare purposes.”
“I don’t care.” I kept my tone as level as possible. I was going to be confident and assertive and remain in control, and not let my anger rule me. “Where is the driver now? We can direct him by phone. Cash in hand for a three-minute drive. He can tell his bosses anything he likes.”
“I’m sorry, sir, he never set out—they said a journey that short wasn’t worth their time.” John-Paul was clearly in real distress at the whole affair, or d
oing a very convincing impression of being distraught. My own feelings were complex but not uncommon: I felt the visceral frustration and uselessness of a person confronting a bureaucratic obstacle, the same feeling that had afflicted me while speaking with “Fran” from Meetex customer services. It was a feeling analogous to discovering that the open road ahead is not in fact an open road at all but a hyperreal photograph of an open road printed on a satiny smooth, completely impervious surface—a prospect utterly closed, without any hope of appeal, but presenting a mocking mirage of free access. This was rage; towering, futile, empty rage. John-Paul’s distress was perhaps related to his innocence in the matter. If it was Way Inn that was placing the senseless barrier in my path, I was sure he would be more placid and satisfied. That is the way of the corporate wall.
“OK,” I said. I felt curiously short of breath, as if the air had been forced out of me by the fury within.
“I know,” John-Paul said, grimacing. “It’s frustrating.”
The front desk no longer seemed able to assist me—the services it offered were now startlingly irrelevant. But I did not move from my spot. There had to be a way of arranging transport to the center. This defeat seemed premature. John-Paul was looking at me as if he had just been told by his parents that the family dog’s increasing senility meant it would have to be put to sleep, and I was the dog.
“I have an idea,” he said.
“Yes?” I said, hoping I didn’t look too pathetic in my eagerness to hear what he had to say. “Go on.”
“We could call a taxi for a round trip—pickup here, go to the airport, then to the MetaCenter. It’ll cost more—”
“Brilliant,” I said, slapping my fingers on the desk surface, uninterested in the cost. “Do it. Please.”