The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  —To cheat death, said Chip.

  Meadowcroft relayed the messages to a smiling Edison.

  * * *

  The inventor sat quietly for a moment, warming to some private theme. Later, Hal would recognize this as its own kind of incandescence, the way his face flushed like a filament.

  —I was put here, good sirs, to tinker and illuminate. Nothing more or less. Sometimes I improve on the work of others, and sometimes I make a thing from scratch. In the matter of projected images, I believe we’re still rumbling along …

  He ran a palm across his hair, combing it into place with two fingers.

  —The human imagination, you see, is such a finite container. We must kill off the weaker ideas and pursue the stronger ones. It’s the same in nature, no?

  Hal leaned forward to implore him.

  —If we can’t get our film into the theaters, then we’ll go bankrupt. Have you seen it? Perhaps if you watch it then you’ll understand what’s at stake. It’s the most innovative and expensive film ever made.

  To Meadowcroft’s relay, Edison said:

  —I’m not much interested in watching pictures. I’m sure it’s quite accomplished, the legal tethers notwithstanding.

  * * *

  There was a long pause. Edison looked out through the tall windows, leaned forward in his chair.

  —Here’s a story: I used to fish at a particular stream not far from here. I’d take off sometimes at lunch and grab a rod and see what I could pull out of the stream. However, soon everyone knew where I would go to clear my head and they’d follow me there with business. You know what happened?

  None of them answered.

  —The fish stopped coming, so I started to fish at night, when no one else was around … night fishing is a wonderful time for imagining the future, I’ve found. Now, gentlemen, I have correspondence to get to. Also, we’re holding a concert in the music room at five if you’d like to stay.

  Just as Edison began to swivel his chair toward his rolltop desk and his waiting cheese sandwich, it was Chip Spalding who stood up, arm in a sling, mostly without eyebrows.

  —Just one moment, he said, clearing his throat.

  Meadowcroft put a hand on Edison’s shoulder and the old man turned around. Chip limped over so that he was close enough to Edison’s right ear that he could make his speech without translation. He put one hand on the back of the chair, grazing Edison’s shoulder as he leaned over.

  —You pretend to be a regular fellow, punching in like a working chap, but the truth is, Mr. Edison, with all due respect, you’re a ruthless mogul, no different from Carnegie or Rockefeller or Vanderbilt. You surround yourself with fancy solicitors, potter around in your laboratory, while you sue the bejesus out of any man who comes up against you. It’s cowardly, it is, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. We’re just trying to make a living. This filmstrip of ours, it’s got everything we have in it. It might as well be made from our own intestines. Let us run with it wherever we can. We’re begging you …

  Edison had been staring into the distance during Chip’s speech. When it was over, he offered up a cryptic smile.

  —A lot of us are fishing nowadays in the same waters. Nonetheless, all the best spots are already taken.

  They all watched as he turned slowly in his chair and wheeled himself back to his rolltop desk. He picked up his cheese sandwich and took a bite. Meadowcroft, now in the manner of a saloon doorman, placed one hand on Chip’s elbow, the one without the sling, and said, I will see you gentlemen out.

  * * *

  They came upon the studio in the early hours of evening, a few windows lit up in the main house and the porch light on over at the cottage. In the cool night air, the yew maze breathed out an intoxicating juniper breath. Now that production was complete, the hotel facade had been dismantled and the production stage stripped bare. There had been little talk of the next production, so most of the crew had gone in search of other work. Hal parked the motorcar on the gravel drive and told them they’d assemble in the morning to discuss their options. He said good night and walked silently into the house, his shoulders slumped.

  * * *

  Chip headed out to the stables, to the equine comfort of his sleeping loft, while Claude walked toward the stone cottage. More than anything, he wanted to eat a bowl of soup, play a board game with Leo, and watch Sabine brush out Cora’s hair. He wanted to make love to Sabine to wash away some of the dread in his chest. This film had begun as a ploy to rescue his mind from the ravages of unrequited love, and instead it had turned into the death sequence of the entire studio. Without a wider release, they’d be lucky to see out the rest of the year.

  * * *

  When he opened the door to the cottage he noticed how dark and cold it was, how the fireplace was barren, the lanterns unlit. He walked back toward the children’s bedroom, expecting to find Sabine dozing with Leo and Cora against her shoulders, a Conan Doyle novel splayed across her chest. But the room was empty. He moved down the hallway, toward his own brocaded and pillowed bedroom, calling out as he went. The chest of drawers was emptied, the armoire door ajar, a few scarves and camisoles tossed over the bed.

  * * *

  He walked into the darkened kitchen and lit the kerosene lamp. There was a mailbag propped onto a chair, dozens of letters ripped from their envelopes and strewn across the floor. On the countertop, a notecard had been placed against a vase of flowers and his hands were trembling as he picked it up:

  My dearest friend and husband, I can no longer endure it. We will be safe, but far away. Je regrette. —SM.

  He was out the door and running toward the actors’ bunkhouses, then sprinting up the porch stairs and through the main house, calling out to Pavel and Helena. Hal came out of his office clutching a whiskey bottle and they looked at each other through the darkened interior, two strangers in the hallways of hell.

  —The security guard at the gate says they took the old horse and carriage an hour after we went to see Edison. She must have been waiting for her chance.

  Claude looked down at the notecard in his hands, flipped it over and over, as if he’d missed an addendum or a postscript.

  —What about the Russian and the maid?

  —Gone as well.

  —She must have grabbed one of the mailbags from your office.

  * * *

  Claude took the bottle of whiskey from Hal, brought it halfway to his lips, stopped. He handed the bottle back to Hal and walked down the darkened hallway and out into the cool night. Back in the cottage, as he stood by the light of the kerosene lantern to read some of the opened letters, it fell through him that she was never coming back.

  Vamp,

  What has the world done to deserve your European contempt and mockery? How we let you into this country is beyond a thinking man’s sense. You should go back to your homeland where they eat babies and drown in sexual vice.

  Harry T. Simmons

  Madame,

  You have changed me. When I seen your face and hair, I knew I was a goner. You floated up above the city like a dream. Please consider this a proposal of marriage and know that I will send for you soon, my love. Whatever impediments lay on the broken road, I will sweep them aside in this ardent pursuit. My name is John Gordon Hyatt and I am a man of some means. Until soon, amour. JGH

  Sabine Montrose,

  You represent perhaps the greatest threat to civil society. In regards to your recent film “The Electric Hotel” I am writing to tell you that Christian married women everywhere will mull your name alongside the devil’s, for it is in his company that you belong. An archangel seductress and a Vampyre ripped from Poe.

  Miss Sybil Plum of New Jersey

  Permit me, dear madame, an admirer and scribbler at times, to address you in a friendly manner, for I feel that I am an intimate and long acquaintance of yours. My addressing you is to satisfy a long pent-up desire that has been filling my heart for years. I only wish I had you in a room quietly by myself and
free of interruption for half an hour. I would strap you on a table, your feet on the floor, making a fine half crescent at a certain part of your body, convex-side upper-most, I would bare you to the skin, and then proceed to ply a stout leather strap with knotted tails to your buttocks. Heavens! I enjoy the very idea of it. There would be no delay between sentence and execution. I would consider my deed righteous. But in the tempest, torrent, and whirlwind of my passion, I would beget a calmness of scientific applications. I would study the torture with exceeding joy as I saw the blisters and welts accumulating under my scientific handling. Then I would untie you, madame, and lead you to the sofa, and then love you back into heartedness and joy before snuffing it all at once. You would call me master in the voice you once reserved for Phaedra.

  Yours till we meet across the Jordan

  —JM

  P.S. Perhaps when I kill you and your waifs I will become the most important person in your life.

  20

  The Monogrammed Suitcase

  Toward the end of 1963, Claude sometimes called Martin in the middle of the night. These phone calls never began with hello or hope you weren’t sleeping, they just launched into the middle of his tumbling thoughts. One night, he said his whole life had been a misunderstanding. Another time, he told Martin that D. W. Griffith, before having a stroke and dying under the chandelier in the Knickerbocker lobby, had been drunk and singing and walking down the hallway of the eleventh floor in his boxer shorts.

  —Do you know, Martin, what his last words on this planet were?

  —I couldn’t guess.

  —He said I’ve been gone so long I don’t remember what they call me.

  * * *

  Claude couldn’t sleep for the month after the Kennedy assassination. He’d watched 1963 unfold between the pages of the newspapers in the lobby—the introduction of zip codes, the closing of Alcatraz, the anti-segregation sit-ins, an airliner crashing into the Florida Everglades—and it all made sense to him as a series of headlines, as dispatches from the second half of the twentieth century. But November 22 and its aftermath didn’t fit the pattern; it seemed to come from outside history.

  * * *

  Since he didn’t own a television, he’d come down to the lobby after someone knocked on his door to tell him that the president had been shot. In the Spanish mortuary pall of the lobby, he saw a group of residents huddled around a television set, the doorman, Sid, quietly weeping with his gold-braided cap in his hands, and Susan Berg, wrapped in her bathrobe, pacing in circles and saying, We are all tainted by this, every last one of us. Claude could remember looking out the windows of the lobby, where he usually saw secretaries and underwriters bustling to and from the Guaranty Office Building, but now the streets were empty, cars pulled off at the curb, a small crowd consoling one another, huddled in front of an appliance store with televisions in the window.

  * * *

  In the days that followed, Claude made his foraging and photography circuits through vacant lots and along hillsides and streets, only to find the city’s mood had changed. Among the college dropouts on the strip or waitresses staring out the windows of a diner, there was a dazed, bewildered expression. Car horns were eerily silent, as if a honk might offend the somber motorist in front, and the love songs of the previous summer petered out on the radio in favor of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Strangers held doors and elevators a little longer for one another, nodded hello out on the curbstone a little more often. One Monday morning, Claude photographed three men in gabardine suits changing a flat tire for an elderly woman who was stranded at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

  * * *

  After so many sleepless nights, he returned from these expeditions to collapse into his armchair by the window in his apartment. He removed his eyeglasses, leaned his head back to stare into the vagueness above, and quickly fell into fitful sleep and troubled dreams. He saw images of a funereal presidential limousine and the shining blacktop tarmac in Dallas, but they were spliced together with impressions of the tiger’s head in Hal Bender’s office, its eyes fixed on the window where the Palisades and the river and Manhattan floated through a summery haze, or the widow falling from the burning zeppelin, and then a sequence of Irene Lentz’s jump from the eleventh floor of the hotel from the previous November, her feet idling back and forth from the bathroom window ledge as if she were testing the waters of a deep pool. In the dream, she nudged herself off into space and fell toward the concrete awning in total silence while Claude craned up helplessly from the sidewalk. She moved through the chlorinated Los Angeles sunshine in slow motion, languidly, as if the air had become water.

  * * *

  Claude never made it his habit to impose his dreams on a conversation, so he didn’t tell Martin about his nightmares when he telephoned in the small hours. Martin, who said he was ashamed to be from the same state that killed Kennedy, let Claude talk about whatever was on his mind. He talked about the five thousand canisters of undeveloped film he kept in a lightproof storage closet in his living room, three decades of shutter clicks.

  —You’ve never exposed the negatives? Martin asked.

  —When I worked as a wedding photographer all those years ago, I always sent the negatives to a lab, but the ones I took for myself I never developed. Until that second they hit the chemical bath, every image is perfect in my mind. I have one of Betty Grable slumped at the bar with a bouquet of flowers on the empty stool beside her. And I have one of Marilyn Monroe up on the sundeck in her bikini. She liked to sunbathe up there and listen to baseball games on a transistor radio. I took one on the day of the assassination that shows a heartbroken Susan Berg kissing the manager’s English setter on the top of his head.

  Claude could hear Martin drawing on a cigarette.

  —They sound incredible … Maybe we could organize an exhibition after we show the feature.

  Martin was working on a restoration of The Electric Hotel and planned to exhibit a remastered version in the spring, as part of his dissertation in film history.

  —No, no, you mustn’t touch the photographic negatives until I’m gone.

  There was a long pause, then a crackling lick of static that curled around the silence.

  —It appears we’re down to the last batch of celluloid. Can we meet on Tuesday?

  Claude looked over at the ravaged suitcase he’d dragged out from under his bed. It was the leather valise he’d used to carry equipment and supplies during the early days of the war in Belgium.

  —It is Tuesday, Martin said.

  —Then I will see you in a few hours.

  * * *

  By nine that morning they were sitting in Claude’s living room, staring at the suitcase on the floor. Claude knew that history could show up in a ravaged suitcase or a battered metal trunk but he also knew this valise contained his own ashes, the cinders after the Mansion of Happiness had been burned to the ground. It hadn’t been opened since 1929, since the year Claude moved into the hotel. The brass latches were stippled with verdigris, the dark leather striated with mold, and there was a flaking gold monogram—S.M.M.

  —Are those Sabine’s initials?

  Claude nodded and Martin got on his knees to open the latches, releasing a damp cloud of bromide and leather. Inside was a bundle of rusting film canisters, lashed together with twine, along with a first aid kit, a military field canteen, some letters and notebooks, and several compact box cameras.

  —She left the suitcase behind in New Jersey after she vanished. I don’t know why I kept it. In Europe, during the war, it held everything I had.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, they watched some of the restored suitcase footage in a small screening room at the university, the projector throwing out its submarine light. Starbursts of damaged emulsion dissolved against the screen, then a landscape juddered into view. A silent field of mud, tree stumps, and trenches smoking against the twilight. The swaying camera—looking out over a hillside from a grove of pinewoods—didn’
t appear to be mounted on a tripod. A German soldier in a spiked helmet and jackboots emerged from outside the frame and walked onto the field to survey the scene. A few other soldiers were behind him, unwinding a long hose.

  * * *

  Seeing it all these years later, it took Claude a moment to realize that it was a flamethrower on the first soldier’s back. At first it looked innocuous enough, like a couple of oxygen tanks and a garden hose, but then a white flame came spewing from the nozzle, unfurling like a ribbon of magnesium.

  * * *

  They watched as the French soldiers were lit on fire, scrambling out of their trenches, flailing against coils of barbed wire. They raked silently at the air in front of them. A few of them took off running onto the muddy field until they fell to the ground, batting at their own flaming heads.

  * * *

  The projector thrummed through its gears and the footage grained to black for ten seconds, as if entering a tunnel, before coming back. Another man entered the viewfinder, walking down the hillside. The camera appeared to be sitting on the ground now, just staring out vacantly. The man was bone-shouldered, stooped, and uncertain on his feet, wearing a motley uniform with a forage cap instead of a helmet. He stepped across the smoking lunar landscape, oblivious to the burning turmoil all around him, and provided silent instructions to the German soldier. The stage direction was so unhurried that it could have been a rehearsal for a boarding school tragedy. Then the gaunt man trudged back up the hill toward the camera, and for a second his gaze cut into the lens.