by Will Wiles
“OK, room attendants. Do they know?”
“No. None of them. No need. Turnover among the customer-facing staff is typical for a large service-industry chain, which is to say high. Even within the corporate structure there are very few people who know. Board members and nonexecutive directors and department managers come and go, like any other company, without really knowing anything about the structure they serve.” She fished a stray eyelash from the corner of her eye with her little finger and studied it intently. “Corporate apparatchiks are not naturally inquisitive creatures.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, and immediately felt the pathetic scale of the understatement. “There are a lot of things I don’t understand about all this, but right now I mostly don’t understand how it could be kept secret.”
“Do you want to tell someone? We could tell him,” she said, jutting her chin toward a man alone on the far side of the bar reading a newspaper and drinking a beer. “Or one of the staff at the front desk? They don’t look too busy. Or we could call CNN.”
She was waiting for my answer, sarcastic expectation writ plain in her shining eyes. I didn’t say anything. Her point was already clear enough.
“Telling is useless,” she said. “You have to show. And the hotel has to want to be seen. Sometimes a fire door is just a fire door, and you’re left in a concrete stairwell that leads down to where they keep the bins. The hotel must angle itself toward you, and it can easily untether itself from a branch if necessary. As a defense mechanism—against fire, against discovery.”
“You talk about the hotel as if it’s a living thing,” I said. “Wanting things, defending itself.”
“Yes. Maybe it is. Not alive in the sense we know. But it wants, certainly, and it tells, it speaks, it shows, it reveals. It has whims. Maybe it has a purpose. Spend time with it and you sense . . . a mind. The inner staff, the hotel servants I told you about, believe themselves to be the sole expression of the hotel’s will, but they are zealots. Zealots confuse their own fears and lusts with the interests of the cause they serve. Their judgement is clouded.”
Did she mean Hilbert, and his concerns about her? That he was paranoid, and simply wrong about Dee posing a threat to the hotel? I could picture him as a kind of Travelodge Torquemada, a grand inquisitor entrusted with a great dark secret and taking it on himself to root out any threats to that trust, real or imagined. I had no desire, I realized, to facilitate a meeting between him and Dee. I would have to find a way out.
More troubling than the machinations of Hilbert was the question of what the hotel might want from me. If it had a purpose, then what was my role? The anomalies it had generated around me, its matchmaking—maybe the hotel is trying to tell you something, Dee had said. What, then?
“What does the hotel want?” I said. “Broadly, I mean, in general.”
Dee shrugged. She looked tired. If this was how she lived every night, every day, her body clock must be shot to pieces. “What any organism wants, I imagine. To persist. To grow. To open new branches, increase its presence in our world. Every day more of our reality is its reality.” Her weariness could have been depression. Perhaps she was disenchanted with her own role in Way Inn’s expansion—perhaps that was the erratic element Hilbert feared. Or perhaps he sensed that she was ready to tell others about the secret nature of the hotel.
“I think the hotel wanted us to talk,” I said. “To get to know each other. It assisted that.” Partly via Hilbert, I did not add.
“Yes,” Dee said. “Although that’s not why I called you.”
“Why, then?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said with a chiding smile. “Not because of any particular allure on your part. You might think there was something charming about your persistence. There really wasn’t. Although it was amusing to watch the wheels coming off a character like you.”
“What kind of character is that?”
“Fairly good-looking, fairly beguiling manner, obviously a master craftsman when it comes to the one-night stand. You’ve slept with a lot of women, yes?”
She arched her eyebrows with the query. I made no reply. This was a dismaying turn for the conversation—her candor up to this point had made me feel as if we were growing friendly.
“OK, a lot. If you weren’t confident about it you probably would have blurted out some awful lie or euphemism or bit of self-deprecation by now. Listen, your success to date might not be due to your good looks or delightful personality but because of your sheer forgettability. You’ll do.”
She had been drinking. So had I. I felt myself heat up. “Vulnerable, are we? You’re worried that you’ve exposed yourself, so now you lash out in case I get too close?”
“Oh wow, bravo,” Dee said, pantomiming applause. “First-rate, airport bookshop psychology, vintage stuff. I should have known better than to try anything like that, you’re clearly a connoisseur of loneliness.”
“You’re not the only one capable of detecting patterns.”
“That’s the stage we’re at now? ‘Takes one to know one’?”
“You think I’m being childish? Well, you started it.”
We lapsed into silence, out of place in the warm, beery good cheer of the New Orleans Way Inn. I felt cheated by this abrupt change in tone on Dee’s part, and frustrated that I should have been so quickly relegated from her trust. The world had changed for me in the past couple of hours, completely and perhaps forever, and I now discovered that my one ally in this transfigured reality thought I was an arsehole.
She hadn’t really denied what I said about her, though, just as I had been unable to truly contradict what she said about me. Which was presumably why we had reached an impasse. Our silence was inward, and shared.
“It hasn’t been working that well lately,” I said. I calculated that some openness, some humility, might end the standoff. Three in the morning is no time to fight. “The charm, all that. I’ve pissed people off. People I should have behaved better toward. Yeah, I was forgettable. I was treating forgettability like a superpower. But people remember.”
“Do you want another drink?”
I did. Minutes before, floundering in the revelation of the inner hotel, I would have considered sleep impossible. Now the idea of it was growing unstoppable. My walk across continents and the day’s other excursions were seeping from my joints as soreness, a deep bone-ache. The high tiredness that comes after high emotion; fuck tired, breakup tired. Dee was at the bar, black leather back to me, a couple of inches taller than the men on each side of her. The trainers and the jogging bottoms made sense. She spent most of her life on foot, in the corridor, long strides down those inexhaustible avenues, looking for the middle of the maze.
“No ice, right?” she said on her return.
“Right.” The same as hers.
“The reason I called you,” she said, holding her glass as a barrister would hold the piece of evidence her case rested upon, “was I suspected that you were very close to figuring out the hotel on your own. You had clearly seen the inner hotel; it had been revealed to you, but you didn’t know what you were seeing. It, this, the conversation we’re having here, was a big risk for me, but I wanted to get to you before they did. Before the inner staff.”
No ice, but a chill nonetheless.
“Given the path you were on, I figured it was inevitable they would contact you. So I intervened.”
“Am I in danger?”
She leaned forward, eyes wide, serious and alert. “Don’t sit down with them. Don’t talk with them. Don’t deal with them. Just don’t. They will be pleasant and plausible. Their lies are like the hotel: unending, and you can lose yourself in them, never find a way out. They will offer you exactly what you want and you must turn your back.”
Too late. Too late. Too late. I had sat down with Hilbert, dealt with him, accepted his offer. I felt a spasm of panic. What had I done? What had I undertaken to do? Could I extricate myself? Surely the encounter couldn’t entail
the mortal hazard that Dee’s severity implied.
“Maybe it does take one to know one,” she continued after I failed to reply. What was the outer manifestation of my inner turmoil? Did I look pensive? Serious? Concerned? Sweat had broken across my brow, despite the perfect global equilibrium assured by Way Inn’s untiring air-handling units. “Permanent residents of the passing city. Hotel people. Isn’t that what you said? The others flow around us, we remain.”
“You’ve been out here four years now. In here. Four years in Way Inn. Is that right?”
Dee nodded, lips tight.
“Family?”
“Not really,” she said. “No one close. Why do you ask?”
“Constantly travelling, being away—it’s not family-friendly.”
“I’m not away. I don’t have anything to be away from. No rent, no bills, four years’ salary straight in the bank, untouched.”
“My father was a salesman. He was away more often than not, in hotels around the country. It was hard on my mother. On us both.”
“That didn’t stop you following in his footsteps, though.”
“Hardly in his footsteps,” I said. “I told you, I didn’t care for it. It was a means to an end.”
“To be the better person, the hotel person.”
“Yes.”
“Free from encumbrances. Limitations. Floating. Weightless.”
“Yes.”
“Like a different state of matter. A higher state of matter.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I figured.” She drained her glass. “I just like not having to tidy up. That goes a long way. I never really imagined that daily housekeeping would be my price for pledging service to an indifferent and possibly hostile entity with unimaginable power and unknowable goals, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.” She examined the traces of liquor clinging to the sides and bottom of her glass. “I really fucking hate making the bed. Fuck that shit.”
It was hard to tell if she was joking or not. Her whole style was one of misdirection and sleight of hand—an edge like a stealth bomber, to disappear, to not be seen. Everything she said could be taken as a way of not saying something else. This could apply, I realized, to the barrage of revelations about the hotel she had let slip earlier. It could simply be a blind for another course of inquiry—about her, perhaps. But I was three doubles down and fighting a rising tide of exhaustion.
“Speaking of bed,” I said, “I’m going to have to get into mine pretty soon. Maybe we should be getting back?”
Back across the Atlantic; the ocean was elsewhere, unrelated to the structure we walked through. From the bar in New Orleans we took the stairs up to the second floor. We had done all our walking on the second floor, the same floor as my room. And perhaps hers?
“Why the second floor?” I asked. “Is your room here?”
“No,” she said. “The hotels don’t connect on the ground floor. That seems to be a necessary part of preserving the illusion they are discrete buildings. We’re using the second because that’s where your room is. And it’s a good floor. Mostly just guest rooms, little extraneous junk like fitness centers and business suites.”
The business suite. “I was going to show you those paintings in the Gallery Room. Eight of them, in a sequence.”
She stopped, and I stumbled to a halt with her. We had been in a corridor, of course; her long, limber pace had consumed the carpeted kilometers with ease and obliged me to half-trot to keep up. Moving at that speed, it was not hard to see the hotel as a limitless maze, as doors and paintings and turns and light wells went by without the opportunity of consideration. Standing unmoving in a generic stretch of the hotel—uncertain where on earth we might be, if we were on earth—was a cue to again realize that this was a hotel. A real hotel, not a stage-set illusion. One of the subdued uplighters had a minor fault and was gently stuttering. The nearest doorknob had a DO NOT DISTURB sign. In all likelihood there was a sleeping businessman or woman behind the door, unaware of the man and woman outside, unaware of where they had come from or where they were going. Tiny mysteries were common in hotels at night. The sudden sound of feet running past the door. A fraught, whispered conversation. A stranger trying their keycard in your lock, turning the handle. Screams, sobs, and mirthless, maniacal laughter. These abnormalities were normal. I ascribed them to drink and the diversity of humankind, and turned over, and went back to sleep. Would they be so easy to disregard now? I feared not. However tired I might be, it was possible my freshly laundered hotel pillow would never again be so comfortable, and the tiny chocolate it supported would never again be so sweet.
“I try to avoid the business centers,” she said.
This struck me as odd, given her obsessive-compulsive, completist traits elsewhere. “Why?”
She didn’t answer.
“It’s the middle of the night,” I said. “There’ll be no one there. Everyone is asleep. We won’t be disturbed. We’ll be quick.” It was perfect, in fact: I could tell Hilbert I had taken Dee to the Gallery Room, fulfilling my side of the deal we had made, and it was his tough luck that the visit had taken place at such an unexpected hour, and had taken no more than a minute.
We resumed our walk.
“So which floor are you on?”
A scowl was tossed over her shoulder at me. “Three, actually. Not that you have any business knowing.”
Once Hilbert was off my back, I figured I would be able to tell Dee that the inner staff had approached me and had been rebuffed. I could fudge the chronology of events. Then she might begin to trust me. “I was wondering how we would stay in touch. I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s going on here. Perhaps I can help you.”
“We’ve only scratched the surface, yeah,” she said after a snort that could have been derision or assent. “That’s all any of us do, scratch the surface—useless . . .”
“So we could meet again?”
This time she stopped dead, and I almost ran into the back of her. The look on her face was grim.
“Do you remember our little talk? About fucking? About how it’s not going to happen?”
“Listen—”
“That is not where this is going. My problems”—she widened her eyes at the thought of those problems, and I wondered what they could be—“are not going to be solved by your penis. Just back off.”
“Listen.” I was riled. It was frustrating to be continually dumped back at square one. But more frustrating was Dee’s obsolete view of my motives. “I am not trying to get you into bed. I’m sure, if we did do that, it would be memorable. Really bad or really good. Memorable, anyway. What I’m looking for . . . What I want . . . You have shown me something pretty freaking incredible, yeah? It’s not sitting all that easily with me. I remember when you discovered the same fact, you were reduced to a screaming heap in a hotel lobby, and in fairness I think I’m handling it pretty well. But I want an ally. A friend. Someone I know, who knows about”—I raised my hands at the Way Inn corridor—“this.”
Her severe countenance barely altered, but I believed I saw within it a rapid succession of reactions.
“As well as not being your fuck buddy,” she said, “I’m not your therapist or your babysitter. Your peace of mind is not my concern. You had all this explained to you over stiff drinks, wide awake. Having your hand held by someone with, I might add, considerable patience. I was woken from the nightmare of all-time by strangers in a strange country. Naked.” She looked down at the ground and chewed air. “Also, don’t imagine this is easy for me. I’ve been on my own for four years. Don’t crowd me.”
“OK, fine. I’m not pushing.”
“OK. I’ve got your number. I’ll use it.”
As we talked, our voices low but pitched with emotion, she had hunched over. Now she sucked in her breath and reared up again, back straight.
“There’s more,” she said.
She did not elaborate. Navigating by the restless screen of her tablet
, Dee led me deep into the hotel again, a different climate and time of day appearing in each light well, but between them the same monotonous corridors. Then came a stretch where there were no windows, just an unending corridor, pushing out to the far curve of the horizon.
“I don’t like doing this,” Dee said. “It draws attention.”
“There’s no one here,” I said. We hadn’t seen another soul for more than half an hour. I had the sense of being deep, very deep, in the inner maze. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Where do you want to be?”
“I thought we were going to the business suite.”
“OK then.” She swiped the screen of the tablet, then pointed at the wall. “Do me a favor, would you? Keep an eye on that painting.”
I stared at the painting she indicated. There was nothing special about it. A dough orb settling on a field of billowing mahogany arcs. The air conditioning picked up, sending cool breath across the back of my neck.
“Do you find hotels disorienting?” Dee asked.
“Yes, sometimes,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the painting, expecting a trick to reveal itself, a hidden pattern or submerged representation. “What you said about always turning one way out of hotel rooms, never the other; that’s mostly true, but sometimes it’s impossible to go the right way. You keep making the wrong turn, your brain can’t correct itself.”
“Fire doors. Going through a doorway causes forgetting. All doorways, not just here. That’s why you sometimes enter a room and can’t recall what you wanted there. Or if you go through a couple of fire doors to find your hotel room, you can’t remember the route you took. Buildings are mental as well as physical. Way Inn exploits psychoactive effects found everywhere. It is in a constant state of inner flux, and that flux can be, well, steered. OK, we’re done.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“No? That’s a pity.” She gave me a smug little smile and stepped out of sight, behind me.
I turned and found myself in an intersection, looking down a corridor that had not been there seconds before. At the far end was a glass door frosted with the words BUSINESS CENTER and an icon of peg-like figures sitting around a table.