by Will Wiles
Time to be assertive. “I can’t go any farther. We’re out of time.”
“I’m surprised it has taken you this long,” she said. “How far do you think you’ve come?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I knew the hotel was big, but I had no idea it was this big.”
“More than a mile.”
“That’s insane. That’s like an airport terminal or something.”
“Actually only the longest buildings in the biggest airports are anything like that long.”
“How much more is there?”
There was a noise on her side of the call—an exhalation, a sigh. “You still don’t see? I show you and you still don’t see.”
“It’s more of the same. It just goes on and on.”
“That’s exactly—”
She was cut off by three sharp reports from the phone. Then silence. The phone was inert in my hand.
More than a mile. And more than a mile back. How did I let her lure me all the way out here? A mile to walk back through the same numbing corridors. But I didn’t know there was a “here” to be lured to; I would never have expected that the hotel went on like this. Who did? She had said as much, maybe as a warning, though I had not heard it as such. The hotel guest turns one way, always, and never the other. Thousands of people leaving their rooms and heading straight for the nearest lift, never imagining that, the other way, that same corridor went on and on . . .
“It goes on,” I said to myself.
Not a single corridor, a corridor with branches. My mental map flexed once more, and panned out to reveal fractal continuation and tessellation. The paintings joined at the edges.
It goes on.
I looked down the corridor. At its end, far enough away to be hard to see, was a painting marking a turning or a junction. Then, as I watched, this ending shifted—not a painting, a door? Not a door, an angling of sight, like an effect produced by two mirrors, both shifting, and a longer vista appearing . . .
She was there, in the emerging distance. Behind her, the corridor continued impossibly, until perspective shrank it to an unseeable singularity. But before that point, there was the faintest hint of a curve, a horizon.
She was there, walking toward me, smiling. Behind her, the hotel went on.
It goes on.
The hotel went on forever.
PART THREE
THE INNER HOTEL
All hotels are an interface between the known and the unknown. You inhabit one room on one floor. What does the rest matter to you? You are in an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers, and the hotel must make you feel comfortable and in place. They are structured illusions. Sculpted psychoactive environments. Mirages.”
After we met in the impossible corridor, the woman and I walked a short distance and down a flight of stairs to the hotel bar. A hotel bar. The bar of a Way Inn in a Canadian city, where it was snowing and the sun had not long set. Some early diners were in the restaurant. Men and women came in from outdoors in bulky jackets, stamping slush off their boots. They all looked hearty, red-cheeked and wholesome. I was not dressed for snow but I was not cold. The lobby was the same temperate climate as all the other Way Inn lobbies across the world, neither too hot nor too cold. And why not—they were all the same building.
She was explaining, or trying to explain. A divergent pseudostructure. A non-Euclidean manifold. A prism projecting a hypersurface onto our space-time from a point . . . a point outside. It flowed past me. She clearly did not come close to understanding it herself. Her explanation mixed in generous measures of hypothesis and speculation. She was throwing concepts at the wall, seeing what stuck.
“There aren’t five hundred branches of Way Inn. Well, there are, but they’re branches in the literal sense, sharing a single trunk, the inner hotel. One hotel, going on forever. And new branches all the time. New promontories.”
“It’s not possible.”
“It’s evidently possible. I just showed you. You see, I had to show you. If I did nothing more than told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d say ‘it’s not possible,’ but you’d look all smug and certain while you said it. Now you’ve got that cute wide-eyed expression. That’s what I was going for. You’ve seen it.”
There was some mockery in her words, but it was the friendly kind. She was more relaxed and pleasant than I had ever seen her. A great mass had been lifted from her, it seemed. And laid on me. I felt obliged to rebuild the world of fact around me, carefully verifying every detail. The measure of whisky in my hand, the hardwood floor under my feet, the existence of the woman in front of me.
“Canada. This is Canada?”
“Right. Want to go outside and make sure? It’s minus five or something.” She smirked. “We could go back. We could go somewhere warmer. The sun never sets on Way Inn.”
My whisky, so far untouched, went down in a single gulp. Heat rushed down my throat, flared in my stomach. It was welcome, very welcome.
“Somewhere warmer. Show me.”
We walked and I watched, wanting to register and remember every detail, every turn taken, every door passed. I wanted to see the seams. Stairs, corridors, fire doors. The migraine-fuel alarms of the latter didn’t seem to have any effect on my companion—perhaps she was used to them. I felt their influence on me weakening.
She led the way, now and then glancing at a tablet computer she had taken from her black shoulder bag. I glimpsed the screen—a gallery of the abstract paintings, but in constant motion, shuffling and rearranging, grouping and regrouping into new sequences.
“I don’t see how it’s possible,” I said. “People would notice. It wouldn’t stay secret.”
“People do notice,” she said. “I noticed, and so did you. Although you took a lot of prodding. That’s why people don’t see. People will work overtime, perform all sorts of mental gymnastics, to smooth the utterly incongruous into their rational, seamless, clockwork universe.”
I marvelled at the pile of the carpet, the accent lighting on the paintings, the grain of the dark wood of the room doors; that was it, the grain of the place, the cosmos of tiny details that made up everyplace mundanity. Triggers to ignoring and forgetting, a sedative microarchitecture. Seeing it, questioning it, made it all stand out in freakish obviousness. The red plastic cube of a fire alarm seemed to address me from the far side of an unimaginable mental gulf, like a Neolithic flint spearhead.
“This is going to take all night if you stand and stare at everything like that. You look pretty backward right now.”
“This place should be swarming with scientists.”
“Maybe it is. It’s an infinite structure. There’s plenty of room.” She pursed her lips and for a second looked deeply downcast. “I can’t be the only one who wants to understand and explain. Who looks and sees. Not like the others.”
“The other guests?”
“The others.”
After no more than ten minutes, we reached another atrium, glass-fronted and triple-height, singularly dazzling after the indirect lighting of the corridors. Once we stopped in that brilliance, she looked at me expectantly, waiting for something. The morning beyond the tinted glass was desert bright and the staff behind the reception desk had their hair modestly covered. I had been here before, and so had she.
“Doha,” I said. “Qatar.” She smiled at the answer. This was where I had seen her first—this precise spot. Seeing her returned to this context, I could not help but remember her as she had been then, and trace the contours of her naked body under her clothes. So striking, so statuesque in the astonishing glare of the Middle Eastern sun; when I later pictured her dressed, it was always in ballgowns or business suits. Instead, in actuality, she seemed consistently ready for the gym or a weekend around the house. Today she was wearing a black leather jacket slashed diagonally with a silver zip, a Dangermouse T-shirt, jogging bottoms and trainers. It still struck me as perfection. She was real.
“I think I told you about the sleepwalking,”
she said, looking around at the lobby of the Doha Way Inn as if seeing it for the first time. Maybe she was. As she spoke, we drifted toward one of the sofas and sat. Guests were heading to the restaurant for breakfast. “It explains a lot. About the nakedness. But other things as well. I was working for another hotel chain, studying Way Inn, trying to figure out how Way Inn selected sites for new hotels.”
“In the Middle East?”
She laughed. “No, in Belgium. I was in a Way Inn near Antwerp. That’s where I went to bed. I woke up a couple of hours later, here. I’ve been an occasional sleepwalker since I was a little girl, but while I was on the Way Inn project my sleep was particularly terrible, very disturbed.”
Her eyes lost contact with mine and she fell into a thoughtful silence. “I haven’t walked in my sleep since that day, mind. Not since I went to work for Way Inn.”
“That’s how you found out about . . . this,” I said. My stupor was retreating, but it was still hard to assemble sentences that described my new knowledge and did not sound barking mad. The words were there: hotel, corridor, connected; distorted, curved, infinite. But putting them together—it didn’t work. I was frightened of what I might say, of articulating something I would never have wanted to believe. The whisky in my system was helping in some ways, and not helping in others.
“Yeah. I was distraught. What you saw was only the start of it. The staff here didn’t know anything about it, of course, and couldn’t process what I was telling them. Trying to tell them. Go to sleep in Belgium, wake up on the Persian Gulf . . . I didn’t know. I was incoherent. They got as far as establishing that I was not registered as a guest at the Doha Way Inn. Then I gave them the slip, and headed back into the hotel.”
“Why?”
“I just wanted to be back in my room. And I didn’t know how I could get there, but to go back the way I had come. They meant well, the staff, but I had suffered this extraordinary psychic trauma and they were interrogating me—I couldn’t face it. I wanted to be elsewhere, to go back. And I did. The hotel opened up for me. It revealed itself, welcomed me. I found my way back to my room in Antwerp. After that I spent days, maybe weeks, exploring. Six continents on foot. Totally AWOL. It ended my job with the other chain. But that didn’t matter. I didn’t want that job any more. I was approached by others . . . representatives . . . from Way Inn. They knew all about me. What I did for a living, what I was doing in the hotel. And they offered me a new job, finding sites for new Way Inn branches. Unlimited hospitality in return for my talent and my discretion.”
“Sounds like a good deal,” I said. A robotic reflex, an obsolete one. In the past, very recently in fact, such a deal would have been the consummation of my dearest wish. That wish now seemed fundamentally tainted.
“Tempting, isn’t it?” she said. “The hotel has so much to offer. Room and board is the least of it. It can influence people . . . And its innermost circle, they get special rewards. Have any of them approached you?”
“No, no,” I said. “Not that I know of.” The lie was prompt and deft, and it was a lie, I knew. Hilbert must be part of that innermost circle—this was among my most basic, primal certainties. Hilbert, with his wavering outer form and perfumed talk of quid pro quo and satisfactory arrangements. This innermost circle was new to me, yet there was not a moment of consideration or a whiff of doubt—Hilbert was part of it.
“You would know if you had,” she said, eyes narrowing. Did she suspect me? But if she suspected me of any kind of collusion, why would she expose herself like this? “They get . . . benefits. But those benefits are contingent—they are bound to the hotel. When I started working for Way Inn, they approached over and over, they made their pitch . . . The rewards for the longest, most loyal service . . .”
She trailed off, her expression unfocused, bleak. What had she seen?
“You said no.”
“Never yes, never no. I have tried to maintain a semi-detached position. Freelance, if you like.”
The nested absurdity of my position struck me again, a relapse of my first wave of disbelief and horror, which I thought had gone into remittance. It was the middle of the night, and I was thousands of miles away from my bed. And a far greater distance away from any reasonable explanation. Way Inn’s interconnection, its defiance of distance, its infinite interior: however I looked at the hotel, it looked back with a face of frank impossibility. Logical outrage stacked upon logical outrage. The ghostly implications stretched out like those endless corridors.
“Who changes all the lightbulbs?” I asked.
“Lightbulbs?”
“Down corridors that go on for ever. Trillions of light-bulbs. Who changes them? The number that need changing every day must exceed all the resources of the universe. There isn’t that much glass and metal, anywhere, let alone that many people, that many staff . . .”
“I once read that it takes three power stations to light all the emergency exit signs in the USA,” she said. “That’s a lot of exits. Who paints all the paintings? It was the first question I asked, the simple arithmetic was enough to give me nightmares. My academic background is maths—geometry, topology. I went into corporate real estate on the theoretical side.”
“Estate agents have a theoretical side?”
“Yes! As property has become more a financial instrument than a way of keeping the rain off, it has become quite profitable to study it in abstract terms, and all the smart propcos have a few pet topologists or exotic mathematicians. I’ve been staying in Way Inn for four years, and before that I was studying it for a rival. I know more about it than most, and I’m not qualified to answer your question. I don’t know who is, or who might be. Physicists, string theorists, the gang at CERN. Philosophers. Theologians. Maybe nobody is.
“My best guess,” she continued, “is that our reality provides a kind of template for the hotel, and the inner hotel is an extrusion from that template. There might only be a finity of lightbulbs or paintings, and our monkey cortexes”—she stabbed two fingers at her temple in a sudden gesture of frustration or contempt at her, our, limitations—“just fill in what we expect to see, in the way that our brain sketches over the visual blind spot. There’s an objective physical reality to it, but aspects of our perception are . . . only subjective. Or perhaps a kind of objective delusion. Shadows on the cave wall. Ontology really isn’t my field at all.”
Under my hand, the silver covering of the arm of the armchair. Leather or synthetic? It was so hard to tell.
“You look a little lost,” she said with a suggestion of underlying kindness.
“It’s late,” I said, glancing toward the morning sun. “This is a lot to take in. Too much.”
“Drink might help. No chance of that here, first thing in the morning in a dry country.” She produced her tablet again and stroked at its screen. “Premium drinking time in New Orleans, though. Coming up to nine in the evening.”
“OK,” I said, and we rose from our seats. Flitting back to the Americas for the second time tonight: it didn’t seem any more likely or possible, but I knew it would happen.
Doha again. How strange to be back here, even divested of the more paranormal aspects of my journey. Where we both began, she on her path, and me toward her; two curves, separating then converging.
“I still don’t know your name.” A lie, another lie. She was at last talking to me, really talking, no riddles, no games, and I was lying and lying. It stung.
“Dee,” she said, holding out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, at last.”
The bar of the Way Inn near the New Orleans Convention Center was two-thirds full and noisy, dominated by a couple of large, raucous groups. Previously Dee had abstained from drink, but now she joined me in a double whisky. I needed spirits for the quicker effect, the better to punish those elements of my conscious mind that no longer matched up. A jigsaw with too many pieces; pieces doubled up, pieces that spread far over the edges of the frame, and too many were left over when I believed a picture was
forming.
Suited men wearing credentials for a commercial kitchen equipment trade fair joked and laughed and bragged in southern accents. The money crossing the bar was green, the beer was Coors and Miller and Pabst. But it was a Way Inn bar, in a Way Inn hotel, very similar to all the others, and for that matter very similar to the bars of all the other chain hotels. One of these men, who had had a good day buying or selling stainless steel extraction hoods, would have a bit too much to drink, go upstairs, fumble his way into room 219 and go to sleep. And down the hall I would also be asleep in room 219, and so would the occupants of hundreds of other room 219s.
The barman was busy; levering bottles open, throwing ice, leaning forward to listen to orders, raising and lowering metal-tipped liquor bottles as he poured measures, teasing out the stream of liquid as far as he dared. Dee and I had said little since our arrival. I wondered if Vasco da Gama or Neil Armstrong had felt the way I felt—that a crucial mental boundary had been violated and would stay violated, and astonishment that this moment had been reached by the same human body and the same human mind that had done all the other humble and unremarkable things in their life. I had almost circumnavigated the earth, on foot, in a couple of hours. It was not the immensity of this feat that dumbfounded me—it was the fact that everything continued as normal around me. In Calgary dinner plates were placed in front of diners, in Doha the day’s first arrivals were being checked in, and here the barman smiled and rattled the silver cocktail shaker.
Dee was quiet too, sipping her drink.
“Do the staff know?” I asked. I was still watching the barman. “This guy, the people at front desk, the chambermaids?”
“Room attendants.”
“Sorry?”
“Room attendants, not chambermaids,” Dee said. “‘Chambermaids’ is archaic and sexist. This isn’t Upstairs, Downstairs. Room attendants.”