The Way Inn (25 page)

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.

“Coming?” Dee asked. She was almost at the door.

I didn't move. Had I missed something—a door, a sliding section of wall? There had been nothing but paintings and bedroom doors behind me, not this.

“It's quite safe,” Dee said. “I just made us a short cut. Minor spatial kinesis. It'll close up by itself in a minute, so don't dawdle unless you want to get trapped on your own.”

That didn't sound appealing, so I followed Dee. “How did you do that?”

“Maths and meditation. But I don't like to do it. The inner staff can detect all but the slightest rearrangement, and they're on you like hounds. It's best to keep a low profile.”

“Very wise,” I said. A fresh breeze from the air conditioning brushed my cheek, and I turned to see what I already knew—the way I had come had gone, replaced by the lift shafts, light wells and corridors of the MetaCenter Way Inn.

No one had been in the business suite for hours, and its lights, detecting no movement, had switched to a near-dark power-saving mode. As we arrived they blinked up to full brightness, the corridors coming alive around us. But in one corner the lights had not slept. Beyond the Gallery Room, in the direction of the Vista Room and its scenic overlook, was a pool of light and a rhythmic rustling.

Without a word passing between us, we ignored our destination and moved instead toward this activity. The spectral presence sharing the space with us was plastic tape, put in place by contractors to block off a stretch of corridor, which had come loose and was coiling and uncoiling in a draft like deep-sea tentacles. Behind it, a lobby area like a scaled-down version of the one on the ground floor, ghostly in construction-site temporary light, some glass and steel surfaces wrapped in anti-scratch coating, a few leftover tools and dust sheets in a corner.

“The skywalk,” I said. “They're still building it.”

“Look at this, even the potted palms are ready to go,” Dee said. “All the other hotels are way off schedule. You hear of the same plots being refinanced three, four times.”

“Not Way Inn.”

She smiled, a spontaneous eruption of the professional pride that had been just detectable as she looked at the skywalk lobby. “Way Inn has certain advantages.”

I opened the Gallery Room and dropped the black keycard into the slotted box on the wall inside. The lights came on—a ring above the table, a spot for each painting. Since my meeting here earlier, the room had been used. “Design as a driver of user-centered innovation” was written on a flip chart.

Moments later Dee joined me. She had taken a camera from her shoulder bag—nothing special, a compact digital point-and-shoot. I had half-expected her to be in a Ghostbusters costume, testing the air for ectoplasm. Without fuss or preamble she started to photograph the paintings.

The Nespresso machine in the corner glinted with the promise of uniform, repeatable, predictable cups of coffee of acceptable quality. Perfect for chain hotels, of course. I even have one at home, in my little-used flat.

“So why don't you like the meeting rooms?” I asked.

“I like to stay in control,” she said. Snap. She peered at the screen of her camera, checking the picture she had just taken, and moved on. Snap.

“I noticed that,” I said. “But that doesn't really answer my question.”

“The hotel wields spatial influence.” A shot was lined up. Snap. “Its inner spaces are, let's say, suggestive.” Snap. With all the paintings on one wall photographed, Dee crossed the room to photograph them together in a single shot. “All the decisions and agreements reached in Way Inn's meeting rooms end up benefiting Way Inn. Directly, indirectly, short term, long term, in the end they always benefit Way Inn.”