by Will Wiles
“No, no,” I said. I realized I was still holding a glass and I put it down on the table. “I’m finished. It’s all yours.”
“Good good.” Maurice had been hanging awkwardly in the doorway; now he moved into the room, dropped his large, shapeless satchel noisily onto the table and started to remove items from its depths. “I’m wrapping up here myself,” he said. “Doing one or two interviews, then heading off in a couple of hours. Are you doing the last day?”
“Ah, no, I’m off too.”
“Well, see you on the road then. Straight on to the next show for me. I was looking for you yesterday. I wanted to catch up. All that craziness with young Rhian, Rita, Robyn . . .”
“Lucy.”
“Yeah. I kept an eye out but I didn’t see you around.”
“I wasn’t at the conference yesterday. I had some stuff to sort out.”
“Not there yesterday, not there today,” Maurice said, shaking his head happily. “You need someone who’ll go in your place!” He gaped at me, delighted with his own joke.
“That’s what I was sorting out, actually.”
“With Tom Laing? Saw him in the hall. Interviewing him later.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was patching things up. He was going to ban me. Now he isn’t.”
“Good. Ban you? Seems a bit excessive. You’re not doing anyone any harm. I knew what your work involved. Not hard to put it together. For all your cloaky-daggery stuff, you’re not that discreet. The big mistake is being all cloaky-daggery. Makes people think you’ve got something to hide. Probably what got Laing so wound up.”
“Right. I’ll try to keep that in mind.” It was possible that Maurice was lying, pretending to have known what he did not know, but maybe I had been underestimating him. Genial bumbling was a fine camouflage for guile.
“Sounded like a good idea to me,” Maurice said. “A way to get out of going to conferences. Tough on you, though. What do you get out of it?”
“I like hotels.” My usual answer. It didn’t feel true anymore. Maybe it was time to retire it. Maybe I was the one who should be doing the retiring. Or at least finding another career. “What do you get out of it?”
Maurice had been arranging equipment on the table: notebook, push-button pencils, digital recorder, pens, a little digital camera on a little tripod, a couple of copies of his magazine. He stopped and looked at me, mouth open, entire face open in fact, lost midthought. Puffy features unshaped, a ball of spare Plasticine. Then they resolved into a smile. “I like meeting people. People are amazing. Every one different. Every one interesting. When you talk to them. Get to know them. When you listen.” He looked down at his various tools, adjusted a pencil. “Don’t care too much for hotels, to be honest with you. They’re all the same.”
“Have you ever been approached by anyone from Way Inn? Offering a job?” I asked, but I already knew the answer would be no. Maurice wasn’t the right material. Clearly. It was clear to me now.
“Nope, not me. Why? You? Thinking of leaving the caravanserai?”
“Yes. Not to do that, though.” I was transfixed by the tools Maurice had laid out—tools of journalism, of recording, of reporting, of telling stories to a wider world. “Maurice, Way Inn isn’t hundreds of different hotels, it’s all the same giant hotel, a hotel that goes on forever. There are people who live in it. The hotel can warp the reality within it. It changes people. I’m worried it’s eating the world.”
Maurice chuckled. “Yeah, I feel that way sometimes too. Sounds like you need a holiday. Any plans for Christmas?”
Of course. You couldn’t tell, you had to show. “Can you spare twenty minutes? Half an hour? I’d like to show you something.”
“Not really, old chap,” Maurice said, baring his teeth in consternation. “I’ve got people due . . . Another time, yeah? We’ll have a beer.”
“Another time, then.”
“Nice suit, by the way. Give my regards to Al Capone.”
I passed the first of Maurice’s interview subjects on my way out of the room. Nothing more than a bloke in a suit, but then I was nothing more than a bloke in a suit. Seeing Maurice had somehow stabilized me, made me feel less as if the ground beneath me was tilting and the walls were mere figments. But it had not subtracted anything from the fear I felt or my resolution to leave the hotel immediately. The fact that Maurice was unaffected—would never be affected—did not mean I was safe. They already knew me. The hotel had enfolded me in its designs. Even if the nature of the threat was unclear, I did not fancy remaining in place to see it come into focus.
It took very little time to clear all trace of myself from room 219. My possessions went into my bag, the few scraps of rubbish I had produced went into the bin. I returned the pinstripe suit to its hanger and changed into the casual clothes I had worn yesterday. Where was my suit, the one the pinstripe had displaced? Still with the cleaner? Held hostage? Voided? I could always buy another suit. When I passed reception I would ask about it, but my next stop would be the front door. It struck me that I didn’t have to stop at reception at all—I could check out and pay my bill from my room, through the TV, and do away with any possible bureaucratic holdups or ambushes at the front desk.
Bag packed, I switched on the room TV. WELCOME MR. DOUBLE. Good-bye, Mr. Double. The same stock photo of smiling Way Inn staff. Today’s special in the restaurant: Thai green curry. Weather outlook: clouds and rain, the same symbol repeating into the future. No more. Maurice was right, I did need a holiday. I would go somewhere without a Way Inn, wherever that was. Katmandu, Timbuktu, a nameless corner of the world.
Using the remote control, I selected “hotel services” and “quick checkout.” An account of my room extras appeared: drinks from the minibar, phone calls, room service meals, dry cleaning. Do you accept? Yes. Charge my card. Proceed to checkout. A crude progress wheel appeared under the words PLEASE WAIT. Under the wheel: TRANSACTION INCOMPLETE. DO NOT NAVIGATE AWAY FROM THIS PAGE. Never reassuring, the progress wheel—unlike the progress bar, it doesn’t progress, it just goes around and around. Its purpose is, I assume, merely to imply that something, somewhere, is working; that servers in sheds somewhere are talking to other servers in sheds elsewhere. But so often the wheels keep spinning over a completely stuck machine, like the wheel of an overturned car in a ditch beside the road.
“What are you doing?”
I jumped hard enough to provoke a squeak from the box mattress of the bed I was sitting on, and looked toward the door to see who had spoken. But there was no one there. A soft dry rattling came from the air-conditioning vent. There was movement on the screen—not the inane rotation of the wheel but, beside it, where the staff of the Way Inn flashed their shining smiles at me, radiating welcome and readiness to serve. Actors, maybe. The movement seemed to have come from the photo, from among the ranks of the staff—and as I looked, one of their number turned, edged sideways and stepped out of the immobile group. It was Hilbert, a small televised Hilbert, strolling across the red-and-white backing of the screen as if it were a stage.
“Bunch of stiffs,” tele-Hilbert said, looking back at the photo from which he had emerged. “Superficially pleasant, but lacking the human touch. So often the case nowadays. That’s the difference between good service and great service, don’t you agree, Mr. Double? The human touch.”
I mashed buttons on the remote, but nothing happened. Moiré patterns flared and blazed on Hilbert’s suit as he walked slowly forward—toward what? Through what? There was no camera, this was a menu; toward the screen, then, toward me.
“Nowadays the hotel business is all about making an emotional connection—making the business traveller feel their soul is being taken care of as well as their body. Or faking it, anyway. Hence the quote from Michel de Montaigne on the cover of the service directory, hence the ostentatious environmental concern about towels, hence the email on your birthday. ‘We are delighted to look after your coats while you are enjoying our hospitality.’ Delighted. Healthy li
ving, too, the photo of the sliced kiwi fruit on the room service menu, the spa and fitness center. Mens sana in corpore sano, yes? A healthy mind in a healthy body. We all want to live forever.”
As he spoke he advanced on me. Blocky digital distortion, aliasing breakdowns, compression fragments, ragged swatches of acidic machine-green and machine-blue, inexpressible noncolors smearing red-black and purple-black, boiled at the crisp edge of his approaching form. He could not be resolved, not by the display technology, not by perceived reality. The pixel froth stirred up by his progress was the screen’s rejection of him. But I was transfixed.
“Does the outer hotel care? It cares about appearing to care. It cares enough to make me sick, anyway. It wants your business, it wants your approval. But it doesn’t know you the way the inner hotel knows you. Transaction incomplete, Mr. Double. Transaction incomplete.”
Hilbert’s face filled the screen, pallid skin splitting with horizontal bars of bruise-colored digital interference. Distortion streamed from the open wound on his brow, where Dee had struck him with the chair. He was bleeding noise and chaos.
I overcame my paralysis and lunged for the off button on the TV itself; Hilbert turned as if able to see my arm—and the screen blinked to black.
“No,” I said, suspecting I could be heard even if there was no one there to listen. “I’m finished. Leaving. Transaction complete.”
They, whoever they were really, could keep the suit. They could keep Dee. I took my bag and left the room in a hurry.
The watered-down Stones tune playing by the lifts was “Sympathy for the Devil.” I hit the down button and a set of doors opened immediately. I hit G for Ground, for Go, for Get out. The doors shut. Maximum occupancy six persons. In the event of fire do not use lift. A photocopied sheet of paper in a frame tells me that the weather outlook is uniformly cloudy and rainy and today’s special is Thai green curry. Beside this is a framed advert for the hotel’s conference facilities. Way Inn and Way Inn Metro branches. Registered trademark.
My reflection, in opposed mirrors. Me, my back, me, my back, and so on, the line of us curving away as the tiny difference in angle between mirrors increased with each repetition. The slight curvature in the line of Doubles obscured the vanishing point—when I try to look round me to see infinity, the other mes are always bending to stay in the way. A mercy, perhaps. Who first placed two mirrors opposite each other? Was there a moment of vertigo when they saw the hole they had made in finite space? Were they afraid? I hoped they felt fear. Fear would have been an entirely appropriate reaction. It often is. I was afraid. Terribly afraid.
Mirrors eliminate the experience of waiting. We preen and this reduces the aggravation of forced inactivity. Like parakeets distracted from their prison. The mirror swallows time. My appearance was not good. Dark rings had appeared under my eyes. I looked rattled, haunted. How much time had been swallowed? Was the lift even moving?
One of my multiple reflections leaned out of line. Just one. I hadn’t moved, only the reflection had moved. Then it stepped from its column, leaving a gap. It was four or five repetitions deep. The pinstripes of the reflection’s suit were reddened toward the collar, but its pale skin was clean. He turned toward me. We stared at each other, mirror-Hilbert and I. Hilbert did not look angry—more terrible than that, he looked pleased and knowing. Then he broke eye contact and leaned to one side, looking around and behind me.
I turned. In the opposite mirror, all the reflections were Hilbert. Those that had their pinstriped back to me all turned as one to join the others in facing me. They stared at me, still with that freezing smile.
In panic, I don’t know if I jumped toward the lift doors or fell toward them, my body not waiting for impetus from the incapacitated mind but making its own decision, cobbling together an ad hoc reaction from the few responsive muscle groups it could raise. But my desperate fingers found the button that opened the doors, and the doors slid apart as I slumped against them, leaving the lift in a couple of heavy, seasick steps, almost collapsing. I leaned back into the lift to snatch up my bag, not looking at the mirrors, at the impossibility they were showing me.
The lift doors closed. This was not the ground floor. It was the second. Signs told me to go right for rooms 201 to 240 and left for rooms 241 to 280. I had not moved at all.
Stairs. But the fire door to the stairwell was not there. If I could only believe that my memory deceived me and the door was in fact elsewhere. How I yearned to remember that it was around the corner or down the corridor. If only. But I knew that it had been here as fixedly as I knew that it was now gone. In its place was a white wall and a painting.
A soft ping issued from the lift and its doors rumbled apart. Hilbert stepped into the second-floor corridor. The expression on his face conveyed no sorrow or anger, nor anything that suggested he was dealing with another human being, or had ever been one himself. He shimmered with distortion. I tensed, but there was no preparation for the blow he delivered, without preamble, with the flat of his right hand to my left temple.
The room died.
Waking for the second time today, I experienced pain as a kind of tiredness. That one blow had knocked all the power from me as surely as it had deprived me of reason. My head was clouded as if from deep sleep. Within it, my brain felt just a little too small, and seemed to shift with the slightest movement, sliding and bumping in its cushioning gravy.
I was sitting at a table, slumped over, head resting on my left arm. My left arm felt good, and I did not want to move. I could see my right arm, and behind that was a glass of water.
My left arm had gone to sleep. I tried to move it, to get some feeling back in the hand, and was rewarded with an igniting match of new pain in the arch above my left eye. A small exclamation of complaint escaped my lips: “Ah!” The table was hard and white, a durable artificial substance, surely trademarked.
“Mr. Double.”
I lifted my head to see where the voice had come from, though I already knew who had spoken. Hilbert sat at the other end of the conference table. For a moment I thought I was back in the Gallery Room—same size room, the same table in the middle. But this room was sparse, the light utilitarian, the door behind Hilbert plain, not dark wood. The walls were white-painted breezeblocks, and only one painting hung on them—one with a broken frame and a liberal dash of Hilbert’s blood. I had the sense of being underground. Air conditioning whirred loudly.
“Have some water, Mr. Double. I’m afraid you hit your head quite hard on the floor on your way down.”
Hilbert sat with his hands clasped in front of him. Blood had soaked his shirt around the collar and stained his suit. But he had cleaned it from his poached-egg skin. The wound on his brow was half-covered by shining black hair.
On my way down. You sent me down, you bastard. I took a sip of water and tasted iron—blood in my mouth. Probing for its source, I found I had bitten my tongue: a neat notch on its right side which started to hurt as soon as I discovered it. So Hilbert was prepared to be violent, prepared to strike and injure and imprison on behalf of the hotel. My fear in his presence was, for the moment, drowned out by anger. He had assaulted me and I wanted to assault him back, or to hit at the hotel itself—to injure it, or at least scare it, in some way. How, though, do you threaten a hotel?
“TripAdvisor is going to hear about this,” I said. “Just you wait. This place is going to get some serious one-star reviews.”
Hilbert smiled. “I apologize for the direct nature of my approach. I hope we can put it behind us and move into more productive areas of discussion.”
“On balance, I think I’m done discussing with you,” I said. “I did everything you asked. Brought her to the conference room. I’m not responsible for what happened. She’s your problem now. I’m useless to you. I’ve got no way of getting in touch with her and even if I had, she’ll never trust me again. Thanks to you.”
“Precisely,” Hilbert said. “She could never be relied upon—you see that now
as well as I do. That woman has burned her last bridge with me. And you should understand that she has nothing to offer you. She is increasingly temperamental and secretive. Unstable. Perhaps dangerous.”
“Yes,” I said. As he talked about Dee, Hilbert’s tone had turned sour, and this made my bruised jaw ache with pleasure. “How is your head?”
Hilbert’s arm flinched at the elbow as he overcame an obvious impulse to put his fingers to his brow and feel the broken edges of his skin. His hands remained tightly clasped in front of him.
“Fine, thank you. Healing very nicely. How is yours?”
My pleasure dissipated. Scoring points against Hilbert could never be more than momentarily entertaining. Whatever brief satisfaction it brought was followed by a powerful sense of futility.
“I don’t know why you need me at all,” I said, a complaint that towed a great tiredness behind it. I wanted to be done, to go home. “You’re obviously a very powerful man, so how has she been able to elude you?”
Hilbert widened his eyes in a look of bafflement and shrugged, an incongruously human, even vulnerable, act. “It’s something of a mystery to me as well, Mr. Double. She is not without abilities herself, and has been able to shield her location. The hotel will be aware of her, of course, but its interventions in our business are oblique at best. That’s why it needs employees with initiative and zeal—employees who can take a more direct approach. Which brings us smartly to the next item on the agenda: my offer to you. I’m afraid I need to push you for a commitment.”
“Offer? What offer? We’re done here. I did my part, you did yours. Thank you. Now it’s time for me to go.”
“It’s not nearly time for you to go,” Hilbert said sharply, rearing up suddenly in his seat, eyes flashing like geodes. “Not until you see the bigger picture. The keycard, the suit—these items are not given lightly, Mr. Double! We had a deal!”