The Way Inn (27 page)

Often I prompted my father to reminisce about his days on the road. Now that I travelled on behalf of the value engineers, I imagined that I had common ground with him, and I hoped—a fairly desperate hope—that I might at last be able to regain in some form whatever it was that I had lost in his absence. But his stories were mostly useless, revolving around disappeared companies serving a dead industry. The country he had roamed was mostly gone.

I pushed him. Didn't he appreciate the serendipity of us having gone into similar jobs? Did he have any advice he might be able to pass on? Father to son?

He rotated his pint of bitter and avoided my eye. “How's your mother?”

It had been a while since I had seen her. Unhappy, that was how she was. No real time to visit, I said, what with work. Surely he would understand. Of all people.

“You should visit your mother,” my father said.

It's not easy, I said.

“You want advice? Father to son? You should visit your mother.”

I didn't say anything. I watched a jogger pounding along the restored towpath, white flex of her iPod jumping like an electrocardiogram, wraparound shades, sweatshirt announcing membership of the netball team of a huge firm of accountants, the only human soul I had seen pass that way in a while.

“Were you with your mother when she came to the hotel?” my father asked. “That time? The last time?”

Yes, I said.

“She said you were downstairs. Did she tell you what happened?”

No, I said.

He weighed this information, mesmerized by the laminated bar snacks menu.

“You were always your mother's boy. There's much more of her in you than me. It's uncanny, just looking at you I see her. That way you have of . . . watching. Always thinking. That's her.”

This was not what I wanted. It was useless trying to connect with this man.

“No one can stay angry for ever, Neil. People can change.”

The alarm woke me. Tiredness came as a form of pain, an atom-level stress in every part of my body. So tired. Three days in a hotel, not leaving a half-mile radius, but I was rowing-alone-across-the-Atlantic tired—tiredness was frozen into me, as basic to my body's composition as water. This was the result of hauling my pampered, gym-estranged form up and down corridors and across roads. But I wondered if on some elemental level my physical being knew where it had truly been; that it had crisscrossed continents, and was somehow making deductions on that account. I yearned to linger in bed awhile longer, but matters of importance awaited. And as more of the events of the previous day and night filtered back into my mind, the more the bed, the room, the hotel, seemed unreliable and deceptive.

But the shower—the shower was still faithful. The hot, powerful hotel shower was a dispenser of innocence. When I reflected on my father's habits in hotels, I thought of how he must have valued the shower, with its permanent supply of fresh starts and its destruction of evidence.

My suit was hanging in the closet, still cocooned in its dry-cleaner's plastic. Having finished my shower and shave, I tore into the red wrapper, pleased that Lucy had done what she did, pleased it meant a crisp, clean outfit on this last day rather than the days-old, suitcase-wrinkled, conference-end garb everyone else would be wearing.

Bright blackness flickered through the torn wrapper. A burst of moiré effect—an unseeable, unthinkable conflict of lines—caused me to blink and refocus.

I kept tearing at the plastic, pulling it down over the suit until it lay fizzing and crackling on the floor, tremoring with tiny, obscene movements like a deep-sea invertebrate dying on a beach. Its staticky, chemical reek was on my hands and in my sinuses.

Before me, on the hanger, was Hilbert's pinstripe suit.

This was no error. Even allowing for the hotel's talent at perverting chance, a mix-up was impossible to imagine. This had to be deliberate. What, then, was its deliberate purpose? A taunt? A warning? A reminder that a score remained to be settled?

But of course it was not Hilbert's suit—at least, it was not the suit Hilbert had been wearing a few hours earlier, when Dee assaulted him. At that moment, this suit was already in my closet, or so I believed—so this was another suit, identical to Hilbert's, sent instead of my own between my first meeting with him and the violent second encounter. Sent while he believed me to be working for him.

It repulsed me. Not the fabric of the thing: the linen was soft and heavy, perhaps hand-stitched. The tricks the close-placed stripes played on my eyes, the way they swarmed at me in my peripheral sight, sickened me inwardly, not least because I found my gaze compelled to return to them, like a migraine bruise throbbing in my visual cortex I could not help but press again and again. But mostly the idea of it sickened me. I was being manipulated. To further dispel any illusion of chance, under the jacket was my white shirt, which Lucy had also soaked and which I had also included in the dry cleaning. More evidence of calculation.

I checked my other suit, the one drenched during my walk back from the MetaCenter yesterday. It was no good. Damp still clung to it, in the armpits and the crotch; it was wrinkled and faintly marshy. There was my leisure gear and the comfortable clothes I travelled in—would a casual look offend Laing, could it make any difference to the outcome of the meeting? He struck me as a stickler, the kind of man who wore shirts under jumpers at the weekend. Maybe, in the pub on a Sunday afternoon, he would opt for a neatly pressed rugby shirt or a Ralph Lauren short-sleeved number.

Sitting on the bed in a Way Inn dressing gown, I looked at the suit hanging in the open wardrobe. Its opticalillusion properties aside, it was just a smart suit, evidently expensive and well made. What made it sinister to me was that it was an outpost of Hilbert in my room; what made Hilbert terrible was, in part, the sharpness of his curiously anachronistic suit.

My room? Not my room—Way Inn's room. I had to remember that everything around me was supplied by Way Inn—the walls, the furniture, the dressing gown I was wearing, even the conditioned air. Keeping that in mind, and exercising all possible caution, would surely be crucial to my continued health and well-being as I navigated this last couple of hours. I didn't mean any harm to the hotel—all I needed was to conclude my business and leave.

To get to my smart, clean, dry, white shirt I had to take the suit hanger off the rack—being a theft-proof hotel hanger, it could not be hung anywhere else—and take the jacket off the hanger. As I put on the shirt in front of the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, my eyes repeatedly revisited the jacket and trousers, which were now laid flat on the bed, and with each visit my mind went back to the events in the Gallery Room. The incident had been a decisive rupture—almost certainly the end of my deal with Hilbert and also the end of whatever I had with Dee. She had been clear: I had betrayed her. As far as she was concerned, I was with Hilbert and his kind. I sensed the first falling flakes of the great snowdrift of sadness that I knew would come to bury my memories of her, that I would have to dig through with freezing fingers and stinging eyes if I ever wanted to find anything good beneath. We had had so little time together. But there had been the possibility of more, and that possibility was now quashed.

There would be time to mourn later. Hilbert, however—Hilbert was alive, at large and presumably none too pleased. He remained a possibility, a glowering and horrible one. In twenty minutes, I would do precisely what summoned him earlier—open the Gallery Room with the black keycard. If he were to reappear, desiring vengeance, perhaps it would be best to pretend that nothing had happened, that I was proceeding with our arrangement along the lines we had agreed, that all was well? I had, after all, played my part according to his terms. Dee's behavior was hardly my fault. If Hilbert was to be appeased in these last hours, my wearing the suit could be taken as a gesture of cooperation.

I tried it on. It fit perfectly—the trouser cuffs sat in the ideal place on the laces of my shoes, and the set of the jacket on the shoulders and across the back could not be improved. I had assumed the fit would be awkward. Hilbert was taller and leaner than I was, and he had seemed less substantial beneath the suit, a mere hanger himself. But this suit couldn't have been more tailored to my more average frame. Two suits, outwardly very similar but very different: one blood-soaked and wrapped around an insane hotel employee, the other fit to me.

Exactly fitted to me. Made for me. In the bathroom mirror, under color-stripping fluorescent light, a Hilbert-like figure looked back at me—better fed, better hair, but of the type.
You're perfect for them
, Dee had said—she had been enraged and panicked when she said it, and I had heard it as an attempt to wound, like Lucy's thrown drink. But how much truth was in it? Was Hilbert's approach, his deal with me, merely the prelude to an offer of a more permanent arrangement? Unlimited free nights suggested permanence, a perk of employment. I believed I could see the meaning in the suit—it was an overture, an invitation. It was not the suit that fit me; I fit the suit. I fit in here.

Well, they had missed their opportunity. Once I was out of the hotel, the suit was going to the charity shop. Let it exude sinister magnificence among the tweed jackets and creased shoes of the deceased. I was finished.

Keycard out, lights off, room dead.

“Nice suit.” Laing was early, which felt like a play against me. An effort that undermined my own early arrival and seemed designed to get me apologizing. I bristled, but remembered: apologizing was what I was there to do.

“Thanks. Shall we?”

Once we entered the Gallery Room, my hand hovered over the wall-slot. So this was what I was reduced to—Dee and Hilbert had messed with my head to the extent that I now attributed mystic power to a quite mundane use of a perfectly normal keycard. My hand was stayed as if it was about to complete a dire voodoo rite. After a flash of anger and resentment, I inserted the card. The room lights went on, obliterating the pallid autumnal dawn.

The carpet tiles were back in place—not the same tiles, I suspected, but replacements from a hidden store. Flexible, interchangeable, low maintenance. The shark's multiple rows of teeth. One of the paintings was still missing from the wall, but the wall itself and the chair frame had been wiped clean. A parabola of brown drops could be made out on an adjacent painting, well camouflaged by its rusty color scheme; blood cast off by Dee's assault forming an energetic addition to a constellation of fawn and treacle spheres.

“Do you think we could get started? I don't have much time.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” I said, sitting opposite Laing.

“Are you OK?” Laing said. “You look a bit off-color.”

“I'm fine,” I said. “I had a slightly disturbed night.”

I was not fine. The enormity of what Dee had revealed to me—both its size and its catastrophic implications—had been dulled by sleep. Rest had placed it in the background, out of proper perspective. Rest, which knits together irreconcilable truths, and enamels inconvenient memories. Rest in one of Way Inn's rooms. The hotel had revealed itself to me on three successive nights, each time when I would normally have been asleep; each night it had torn the surface of my world a little more, then stitched it back up. It was normalizing itself in my eyes, making itself just part of the scenery, as ubiquitous and permanent as the weather. Dee had been right about this, as she had been right about everything else: falling to the floor screaming was absolutely the correct response to Way Inn. Anything else was aberrant. How deep was its influence in my room, where it handled the air, and the invisible electromagnetic spectrum pulsated with malignity?

“Are you sure you're OK?” Laing said. He seemed genuinely sympathetic. “You don't look at all well.”

I forced a smile. “I'm fine,” I repeated. “Thanks for agreeing to meet, I appreciate it. I truly feel that there's no difference between us that can't be resolved.”

“Me too,” Laing said. “And I don't want to be causing you sleepless nights or whatever. I don't take any pleasure in trying to destroy a man's livelihood. We just needed to be sure that you didn't pose a threat to
our
livelihoods.”

“Misunderstandings on both sides,” I said, and I held up my hands in a conciliatory gesture. Then I remembered that I had seen Hilbert making the same gesture. Those long, white fingers, stalks of fungus in a mile-deep cave. A shiver passed up my spine and my hands closed, without a thought, into fists. “I was angry—you called me a parasite . . .”

“Yes, I'm sorry about that . . .”

“No, don't apologize—what I wanted to say was, the most successful parasites don't harm their hosts. Naturally we don't want to damage the meetings industry. But we can provide a service at the margins, for people who are unable to attend your shows.”

“And you'll tone down the sales pitch? Nothing more about how everyone secretly hates trade fairs and conferences, and no one in their right mind would go if there was any alternative?”

“Sure, that won't be a problem. And you won't ban me?”

“No, there'll be no need for anything like that,” Laing said, beaming, the chunky knot on his silk tie shining with satisfaction. “You see, here we are talking this over together like men, eye to eye—isn't this an improvement on the phone or email or communicating through lackeys? I've been in this game a few years and I've often found . . .”

He was away, giving the full spiel on the merits of the flesh, looking me in the eye in order to communicate his authority, but hardly seeing me at all. How much of him was really in the room and how much of me? To what extent did he believe his patter? It barely mattered; we might both be sitting here, but we were both simply avatars of different formations of money, trying to find ways those formations could continue to grow without coming into conflict—representing arrayed abstractions, conflicting and cooperating configurations of capital and interest. Like the actors in the stock photos, playing roles, representing messages, making empty images for empty communication. I thought about what I had just said, about parasites and hosts, and symbiosis, like the organisms in the gut that aid digestion. Like the hotel. The hotel behaves like an organism. It depends on all the people staying within it, working for it, meeting within its walls.