The Way Inn (11 page)

The corridor was empty. There was no sound from the direction of the lifts. Perhaps everyone had already decided what bed they were going to spend the night in and had taken to it. Other trays and other bags were left outside other rooms.

Faced with the gathering quiet of the hotel, sleep spreading through it, conquering room after room, I would normally have wanted to succumb, to spend my last waking moments revelling in the thought that I was one among many solitary sleepers, all subject to the same gentle lullaby from the air conditioning, recycling our slowing, deepening breath. Tonight, agitated and unready to rest, I wanted to participate in that shared experience in another way: by being out in it, awake and alert, moving and thinking amid general still oblivion. I thought of the urban fox, busy in slumbering streets, an outsider but blissfully independent. I dressed quickly, just a shirt and trousers. Now was also the hour of the redheaded woman—or it had been yesterday, at least. Was that only yesterday? It seemed so much longer ago; again she was receding from reality to an afterimage.

Her hour. The first time I saw her, that shining memory, she had been sleepwalking. It had been a recurring problem, she told me last night, particularly in unfamiliar surroundings like hotels. But she had overcome it. Way Inn hotels were now so familiar to her that her night-time expeditions had ceased. Maybe she retained some affection for the night, when the corridors were quiet and the paintings could be found and photographed in peace, and that was what had drawn her down to the bar yesterday, and might lead her to be out tonight. Grasping at straws, yes, I knew that—the chances of just happening upon her in the corridor were a million to one against, especially past 1 a.m. Still, however infinitesimal the odds, they were better than zero. And all I wanted to do was walk.

I stepped into the corridor and let the door of my room close behind me, a task it completed with a certain grace, slowing as it narrowed the distance to the jamb, braked by a hidden mechanism. They would not slam by themselves, these doors; left to its own devices the hotel was quiet, considerate, unobtrusive. Normally, on leaving my room, I would turn left to go to the lifts and stairs—in fact, I would do that in all circumstances, like most guests. I never had any reason to turn the other way. There was nothing down there, only other rooms, other doors. But I turned right.

The black doors I passed—one on my left, then one on my right, then one on my left—gave my pace a satisfying rhythm, and I turned my saunter into a brisk stride. Ahead, the corridor terminated in a fire door, which I pushed through. It opened directly onto a T-junction, obliging me to choose a direction again. From what I knew of the hotel's geography, a left turn would make me complete half a circuit around the Zen courtyard—if I followed it with another left, then another left, I would arrive at the lifts and stairs. So I turned right again; the other, unexpected direction.

The corridor turned to the left, and I with it. I tried to picture the hotel in my head, as a model or a wireframe graphic I could manipulate and manage—it was, from the portion I saw from the outside, a long rectangle in plan, its shorter edge facing the motorway and the service road, its bulk stretching back into the dreary fields. The courtyards were essential to bring light into its inner rooms—but how many courtyards were there? Two, I thought, making the whole layout a figure-of-eight. But already the hotel seemed a little larger than I anticipated—there could be three courtyards, arranged in a line or a triangle pointed at the road.

No one else was about, but I was not alone. Most of the doors I passed were silent, but from behind some came the sound of conversation or laughter, or a television with the volume higher than it should be at this time of night; in at least one room avid, gasping intercourse was taking place. It was, relative to the dead quiet of hotels at other times, a fairly lively night—I fancied it would have been possible to guess that a party had taken place even if I had not known about it. Many rooms had trays and dirty crockery left outside, evidence of earlier meals or midnight snacks; in some, elaborate feasts had been consumed, their remains piled on trollies.
DO NOT DISTURB
signs hung from many door handles. Many people had clearly had a much better day than I had had. Bitterness welled inside me.

Another fire door; beyond it a bank of windows overlooking a second courtyard, deeper in the building. Weedy security lights only hinted at the artfully arranged stones and boulders, aided by the low gleam from the wet surfaces. The lights' reflection in the black of the pond danced and scattered, broken by the falling rain. Not even diehard smokers out at this hour. The hotel above this sodden yard was no more than a grim implication of bulk, its tinted windows patches of thorough blackness in a dark that otherwise would have appeared total.

I kept moving, left, right, right again, trying to randomize my route as I did at the fair, to defy any logical path and experience the building naturally, like a forest, without desire, without rational choices. More inscrutable black doors, continuous indirect lighting, halogen spots on the omni-similar abstract art, painting after painting. Thank God there was no single artist shouldering the job of supplying wall candy for Way Inn. Just this one hotel would ruin his wrist and his eyesight; many more hotels would open while physiotherapy restored him to health. A new Way Inn in Hefei, in Curitiba, in Sharjah, all needing his inimitably imitable visions in shades from chocolate to eggshell. Again his fingers would have to twist around the ragged brush. But the redhead had said they had found a way to industrialize the process, to collectivize it—of course. Looking at the hotel, seeing its size, it quickly became clear how mistaken the impression of a single artist was. No one man or woman could supply the hotel.

Big hotel, really big hotel. I kept my pace up, moving powerfully, covering distance, and still I felt I was in new territory. A big container for people, forever waiting to be filled. This was only the start, the motorway axis was meant to grow, grow, grow—more flights into the airport, more vehicles on the roads, more visitors at the MetaCenter. Even in hard times, a global corporation like Way Inn knew that growth could always be found somewhere. That was what the redheaded woman was employed to find: places to grow. Business leaving other areas had to go somewhere . . . people sloshing around the world, needing a vessel for their night hours. At any given time, five hundred thousand people are in the air, in planes. Five hundred thousand. At all times. Half a million. A city. This population is stable, distributed globally. How many people in hotels, worldwide, at any one time? Many more: a super-city, a megalopolis, its doors always open, its lights always on; twenty-four-hour room service, check in at all times; people sifting through without end. Its population peaks with the passage of night—an empire on which the sun forever sets. These cities are only invisible because most of their inhabitants stay for just a short time, a night or two. They never really stopped to think of their presence in this invisible city. You had to stay longer for that.

Right now, however, I was aware of the guest population thinning around me as I struck toward the hotel's rear. There were fewer trays outside doors, fewer televisions, fewer shouts of laughter or ecstasy. Only the gentle noise of the air conditioning and my own footsteps could be heard. I passed a stairwell and, shortly after, another courtyard. Empty, of course, and as lonely and distant behind the tinted glass as video beamed from a robot probe on the surface of another planet. If there was a moon in the sky, it was thoroughly obscured by the mile-deep shroud of freezing moisture that was the autumn atmosphere.

When I tried to move farther, I found my body resisting me. Not far beyond the third light well, I had to stop. I was out of breath, choked by an acid dryness. Black lightning exploded behind my eyes, surrounded by random, fleeing points of light. Anaerobic pain turned the inner fibers of my legs caustic. Almost without realizing it, without thinking at all, I had been running; I had drained my body's resources before I knew I was making a demand on them. Furthermore, there was nowhere else to go. The corridor ended in a fire door—unlike the others I had gone through, this one was adorned with warning signs.
THIS DOOR IS ALARMED. USE ONLY IN EMERGENCY
.

No more. I slumped to the floor, sitting under one of the abstract paintings. The muscles in my legs ticked and pinged. For a couple of seconds I wondered if I was likely to pass out, but then my tether to consciousness drew in its slack. Late at night, several whiskies, a long day—I had meant at least to wear myself out, so, mission accomplished. It was time to retire. In front of me was a room door. The number on it was 281. Only 281? Surely I had travelled farther? But that meant sixty doors between here and my room, and that was enough.

My strength had returned, and my little dizzy spell now felt like an embarrassing aberration. The whole day felt like an embarrassing aberration. Once I had retraced my steps back to the last turning I took, I glanced at a room number to check my progress.

288.

Not right. The numbers should be descending toward 219, not climbing. Had I somehow completed a circuit or doubled back on myself? The chicanes and doglegs in the hotel's layout had forced me to take many turns, but I was sure that I had been maintaining one overall direction; toward the rear of the building, away from reception. However, one misplaced turn and I would have been heading in the wrong direction; if I had missed two turns out of my calculations, I could have reversed my course without knowing it. I had been moving without thinking, almost willing myself to get lost, after all.

Just like that, my mental model of the hotel melted away. I no longer had a conception of my place within its walls. Inspecting my current location had little use—of course this T-junction looked like one I had seen before; they all did. A sign pointed to rooms 290 to 299—were there more above 299? 2100, 201a? It seemed unlikely that a hotel would have exactly 99 rooms to a floor, but why was that number less plausible than 90 or 105? Even the corridor I had just walked down seemed tinged with doubt—had I really come that way? I tried to picture my former self a few minutes ago, coming down one of these corridors like a ghost walking the same path, but couldn't do it—my former self was everywhere, walking in every direction with equal certainty. There was door 281—had I sat under that painting? And a little farther along was door 280. The numbers were infallible—all I had to do was follow them back down to 219 and bed.

So I proceeded, watching the numbers decline through the 270s. Before long, I came across a light well, a promising sign—it had to be the one I had seen earlier, before I had been obliged to take my break. It was followed by a flight of stairs. I approached these and leaned over the banister—no one else was about. I moved on.

The corridors and junctions I passed were identical to the ones I passed on my outward journey, but that did not mean they were the same. I considered the problem of how to know if they were the same corridors and junctions passed in reverse by my former self. I wished I had done something to better remember where I was as I sped through earlier—not marking my path with string or a trail of bread crumbs, but somehow making a mental note of my surroundings. How? Remembering which doors had Do Not Disturb signs on them? A study of the paintings? The redheaded woman had said as much—that she believed the paintings were a way of encoding spatial information, which sounded to me like a map. This might be mumbo jumbo, but the paintings were the most variable feature in the otherwise completely unchanging corridor environment. But how could I tell them apart? One arrangement of curves and blocks in sober colors looked much like another. They were as indistinct as the corridors they decorated. The surface interest they added to the walls was an illusion—just another layer of banality textured to resemble something more interesting. It was maddening—and at the same time I had to remind myself that I was not lost; that the numbers could not lie.

Ahead, though, something was different. I had become accustomed to the low, warm, nighttime lighting of the corridors; against the rain-soaked blackness outside, it was cheerful and welcome. But more brilliant light now intruded, making the corridors I had seen so far appear dim by comparison. In front of me, the passage took a left turn. From beyond this corner spilled a rhombus of radiance.

An emergency light of some sort. A glitch in the environmental controls, a faulty rheostat turning the ambient luminaires to their maximum output. A fault, quite normal, to be expected anywhere, not least in a new hotel with a newly installed plant and electronics. Still, it held me to my spot. For long minutes—though perhaps they were no more than seconds—I could not move. The persistent sameness of the hotel had lulled me; this interruption to it was fundamentally disturbing. And something about the quality of the light was quite wrong.

Without hurry, I walked to the corner and looked around it—
looked
around it; I did not step around it, I wanted to see the source of this luminosity before proceeding.

The light was not coming from the luminaires or halogen spots in the corridor. They were switched off. The light was coming from outside, through a bank of windows overlooking a courtyard.

I approached the windows, briefly concerned that even this short distance would be too much for me, given the sudden weakness in my legs. After two steps I had to hold up my arm to shield my eyes against the sun, reflected in the mirrored glass of the windows on the far side of the courtyard. The same sun inscribed every detail of the Zen meditation garden two storeys down, driving shadows back into the deepest recesses between the gray pebbles; spawning a twin in the unmoving, crystal water of the pond; and finding seams of copper and ruby in the red hair of the woman sitting upon the flat boulder. The woman from the bar—the sleepwalker—cross-legged, hands resting upturned on her knees, back straight, eyes closed. She was meditating. No clouds interrupted the blue sky above her.