The Way Inn (24 page)

“You said no.”

“Never yes, never no. I have tried to maintain a semi-detached position. Freelance, if you like.”

The nested absurdity of my position struck me again, a relapse of my first wave of disbelief and horror, which I thought had gone into remittance. It was the middle of the night, and I was thousands of miles away from my bed. And a far greater distance away from any reasonable explanation. Way Inn's interconnection, its defiance of distance, its infinite interior: however I looked at the hotel, it looked back with a face of frank impossibility. Logical outrage stacked upon logical outrage. The ghostly implications stretched out like those endless corridors.

“Who changes all the lightbulbs?” I asked.

“Lightbulbs?”

“Down corridors that go on for ever. Trillions of light-bulbs. Who changes them? The number that need changing every day must exceed all the resources of the universe. There isn't that much glass and metal, anywhere, let alone that many people, that many staff . . .”

“I once read that it takes three power stations to light all the emergency exit signs in the USA,” she said. “That's a lot of exits. Who paints all the paintings? It was the first question I asked, the simple arithmetic was enough to give me nightmares. My academic background is maths—geometry, topology. I went into corporate real estate on the theoretical side.”

“Estate agents have a theoretical side?”

“Yes! As property has become more a financial instrument than a way of keeping the rain off, it has become quite profitable to study it in abstract terms, and all the smart propcos have a few pet topologists or exotic mathematicians. I've been staying in Way Inn for four years, and before that I was studying it for a rival. I know more about it than most, and I'm not qualified to answer your question. I don't know who is, or who might be. Physicists, string theorists, the gang at CERN. Philosophers. Theologians. Maybe nobody is.

“My best guess,” she continued, “is that our reality provides a kind of template for the hotel, and the inner hotel is an extrusion from that template. There might only be a finity of lightbulbs or paintings, and our monkey cortexes”—she stabbed two fingers at her temple in a sudden gesture of frustration or contempt at her, our, limitations—“just fill in what we expect to see, in the way that our brain sketches over the visual blind spot. There's an objective physical reality to it, but aspects of our perception are . . . only subjective. Or perhaps a kind of objective delusion. Shadows on the cave wall. Ontology really isn't my field at all.”

Under my hand, the silver covering of the arm of the armchair. Leather or synthetic? It was so hard to tell.

“You look a little lost,” she said with a suggestion of underlying kindness.

“It's late,” I said, glancing toward the morning sun. “This is a lot to take in. Too much.”

“Drink might help. No chance of that here, first thing in the morning in a dry country.” She produced her tablet again and stroked at its screen. “Premium drinking time in New Orleans, though. Coming up to nine in the evening.”

“OK,” I said, and we rose from our seats. Flitting back to the Americas for the second time tonight: it didn't seem any more likely or possible, but I knew it would happen.

Doha again. How strange to be back here, even divested of the more paranormal aspects of my journey. Where we both began, she on her path, and me toward her; two curves, separating then converging.

“I still don't know your name.” A lie, another lie. She was at last talking to me, really talking, no riddles, no games, and I was lying and lying. It stung.

“Dee,” she said, holding out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, at last.”

The bar of the Way Inn near the New Orleans Convention Center was two-thirds full and noisy, dominated by a couple of large, raucous groups. Previously Dee had abstained from drink, but now she joined me in a double whisky. I needed spirits for the quicker effect, the better to punish those elements of my conscious mind that no longer matched up. A jigsaw with too many pieces; pieces doubled up, pieces that spread far over the edges of the frame, and too many were left over when I believed a picture was forming.

Suited men wearing credentials for a commercial kitchen equipment trade fair joked and laughed and bragged in southern accents. The money crossing the bar was green, the beer was Coors and Miller and Pabst. But it was a Way Inn bar, in a Way Inn hotel, very similar to all the others, and for that matter very similar to the bars of all the other chain hotels. One of these men, who had had a good day buying or selling stainless steel extraction hoods, would have a bit too much to drink, go upstairs, fumble his way into room 219 and go to sleep. And down the hall I would also be asleep in room 219, and so would the occupants of hundreds of other room 219s.

The barman was busy; levering bottles open, throwing ice, leaning forward to listen to orders, raising and lowering metal-tipped liquor bottles as he poured measures, teasing out the stream of liquid as far as he dared. Dee and I had said little since our arrival. I wondered if Vasco da Gama or Neil Armstrong had felt the way I felt—that a crucial mental boundary had been violated and would stay violated, and astonishment that this moment had been reached by the same human body and the same human mind that had done all the other humble and unremarkable things in their life. I had almost circumnavigated the earth, on foot, in a couple of hours. It was not the immensity of this feat that dumbfounded me—it was the fact that everything continued as normal around me. In Calgary dinner plates were placed in front of diners, in Doha the day's first arrivals were being checked in, and here the barman smiled and rattled the silver cocktail shaker.

Dee was quiet too, sipping her drink.

“Do the staff know?” I asked. I was still watching the barman. “This guy, the people at front desk, the chambermaids?”

“Room attendants.”

“Sorry?”

“Room attendants, not chambermaids,” Dee said. “‘Chambermaids' is archaic and sexist. This isn't
Upstairs, Downstairs
. Room attendants.”

“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.”