The Way Inn (28 page)

We were helping the hotel. Laing and I, right here, right now. We had met in a meeting room and come to a conclusion that benefited us both, but which also benefited Way Inn. Adam and I would be able to continue sending people out to conferences and the “meetings industry” could grow unmolested. More meat for Way Inn's myriad upon myriad rooms. Laing was talking about the MetaCenter, about expansion, about growth and vitality. Another MetaCenter planned for another city; more conferences, more fairs, more regeneration. More business suits for business suites, as Dee had said; how fortunate for Way Inn. The perfect environment for business. It was working on us now, this environment, this endless fiction woven around us. And I saw it so perfectly, the aggregate of hundreds of thousands of meetings like this one; they led to more hinterlands, more motorways, more out-of-town convention centers and investment hubs, more office parks and redevelopment areas, all of which led to more places for Way Inn. Leaving the hotel wasn't enough. The hotel wasn't just reproducing itself. It was making more places where it could appear, more of these anonymous locales. The hotel was turning more and more of the world into its world.

“I'm serious: you don't look well,” Laing said. He might have been quiet for a while before saying this, observing me as I stared into the interlocking orbs of the paintings on the wall opposite. I could imagine how I looked. I could feel the cold sweat on my top lip and on the back of my hands, and my head throbbed—possibly a psychosomatic reaction as I strained to detect physiological evidence of the hotel's influence. What I expected to feel, I don't know—a tingle, a pulse, a spreading sedation? But it was working on me somehow, working on us all. Remaking me, remaking us, remaking everything. Sucking out the color, as the suit was bleeding the color from my complexion.

“Under the weather, that's all,” I said. “Maybe a dose of convention flu. I need a break, I think.”

“Don't we all,” Laing said, chuckling merrily. “Setting up a new show—it's a roller-coaster ride, nothing quite like it. I'll be pleased when I can look back on it.”

You fool, you're just doing what it wants, and what it wants is no past, no future. You're nothing more than an algorithm wearing rugby-club cuff-links
. “I don't want to take up too much of your time, you must be busy. Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

“It's been good to straighten things out with you. I'm glad we can move along.”

“Yes. Thanks again. This has been really constructive.” More than anything, I wanted to complete this meeting and be gone. This was, I supposed, a far easier and more thorough success than I had anticipated. But it served the hotel first and the hotel above anyone, and its very ease made me fearful of how deep the hotel's influence ran through us. I could not enjoy my success. What I felt was failure, a serious moral and practical failure. A failure as a human.

“Sure, excellent,” Laing said. He stood and I stood with him. Social codes. An action occurred to me, Dee lifting the chair and bringing it down on Hilbert; it occurred to me as a physicality in the room, a shape in the air, as if the muscles employed had left trails for others to follow. If I tried to kill Laing, what then? Would the hotel preserve him as it had preserved Hilbert? Would it preserve them all?

We shook hands. I held the door for him. Left alone in the Gallery Room, I poured myself a glass of water from one of the bottles provided for my convenience. I drank. I had to get out. Killing Laing had not been a senseless atavistic impulse. The action had existed, ready in the space between us, loaded up in my musculature like an app. Yet I simultaneously felt enfeebled; I doubted I could even get one of those heavy chairs over my head. I had to get out.

But here I was. Lingering in the Gallery Room, staring into space—this potent, subversive space—when I could be far away.

As I turned to the door, it opened. Pure fear skewered me. Hilbert, again Hilbert.

“Neil!” Maurice said as he stepped into the room. “What a pleasant surprise. Sorry, did I give you a fright? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Maurice.” I could feel myself grinning, an entirely involuntary reflex, sheer relief. “How nice to see you.”

Maurice smiled back. We both knew I did not smile at him often, and he was enjoying it, cheeks shiny with appreciation. He was normal—immensely, joyously, reassuringly normal. His pinkness and paunchiness, which I had despised, now seemed signs of abundant life. “Are you using this room? I booked it, but I think I'm early.”

“No, no,” I said. I realized I was still holding a glass and I put it down on the table. “I'm finished. It's all yours.”

“Good good.” Maurice had been hanging awkwardly in the doorway; now he moved into the room, dropped his large, shapeless satchel noisily onto the table and started to remove items from its depths. “I'm wrapping up here myself,” he said. “Doing one or two interviews, then heading off in a couple of hours. Are you doing the last day?”

“Ah, no, I'm off too.”

“Well, see you on the road then. Straight on to the next show for me. I was looking for you yesterday. I wanted to catch up. All that craziness with young Rhian, Rita, Robyn . . .”

“Lucy.”

“Yeah. I kept an eye out but I didn't see you around.”

“I wasn't at the conference yesterday. I had some stuff to sort out.”

“Not there yesterday, not there today,” Maurice said, shaking his head happily. “You need someone who'll go in your place!” He gaped at me, delighted with his own joke.

“That's what I was sorting out, actually.”

“With Tom Laing? Saw him in the hall. Interviewing him later.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was patching things up. He was going to ban me. Now he isn't.”

“Good. Ban you? Seems a bit excessive. You're not doing anyone any harm. I knew what your work involved. Not hard to put it together. For all your cloaky-daggery stuff, you're not that discreet. The big mistake is being all cloaky-daggery. Makes people think you've got something to hide. Probably what got Laing so wound up.”

“Right. I'll try to keep that in mind.” It was possible that Maurice was lying, pretending to have known what he did not know, but maybe I had been underestimating him. Genial bumbling was a fine camouflage for guile.

“Sounded like a good idea to me,” Maurice said. “A way to get out of going to conferences. Tough on you, though. What do you get out of it?”

“I like hotels.” My usual answer. It didn't feel true anymore. Maybe it was time to retire it. Maybe I was the one who should be doing the retiring. Or at least finding another career. “What do you get out of it?”

Maurice had been arranging equipment on the table: notebook, push-button pencils, digital recorder, pens, a little digital camera on a little tripod, a couple of copies of his magazine. He stopped and looked at me, mouth open, entire face open in fact, lost midthought. Puffy features unshaped, a ball of spare Plasticine. Then they resolved into a smile. “I like meeting people. People are amazing. Every one different. Every one interesting. When you talk to them. Get to know them. When you listen.” He looked down at his various tools, adjusted a pencil. “Don't care too much for hotels, to be honest with you. They're all the same.”

“Have you ever been approached by anyone from Way Inn? Offering a job?” I asked, but I already knew the answer would be no. Maurice wasn't the right material. Clearly. It was clear to me now.

“Nope, not me. Why? You? Thinking of leaving the caravanserai?”

“Yes. Not to do that, though.” I was transfixed by the tools Maurice had laid out—tools of journalism, of recording, of reporting, of telling stories to a wider world. “Maurice, Way Inn isn't hundreds of different hotels, it's all the same giant hotel, a hotel that goes on forever. There are people who live in it. The hotel can warp the reality within it. It changes people. I'm worried it's eating the world.”

Maurice chuckled. “Yeah, I feel that way sometimes too. Sounds like you need a holiday. Any plans for Christmas?”

Of course. You couldn't tell, you had to show. “Can you spare twenty minutes? Half an hour? I'd like to show you something.”

“Not really, old chap,” Maurice said, baring his teeth in consternation. “I've got people due . . . Another time, yeah? We'll have a beer.”

“Another time, then.”

“Nice suit, by the way. Give my regards to Al Capone.”

I passed the first of Maurice's interview subjects on my way out of the room. Nothing more than a bloke in a suit, but then I was nothing more than a bloke in a suit. Seeing Maurice had somehow stabilized me, made me feel less as if the ground beneath me was tilting and the walls were mere figments. But it had not subtracted anything from the fear I felt or my resolution to leave the hotel immediately. The fact that Maurice was unaffected—would never be affected—did not mean I was safe. They already knew me. The hotel had enfolded me in its designs. Even if the nature of the threat was unclear, I did not fancy remaining in place to see it come into focus.

It took very little time to clear all trace of myself from room 219. My possessions went into my bag, the few scraps of rubbish I had produced went into the bin. I returned the pinstripe suit to its hanger and changed into the casual clothes I had worn yesterday. Where was my suit, the one the pinstripe had displaced? Still with the cleaner? Held hostage? Voided? I could always buy another suit. When I passed reception I would ask about it, but my next stop would be the front door. It struck me that I didn't have to stop at reception at all—I could check out and pay my bill from my room, through the TV, and do away with any possible bureaucratic holdups or ambushes at the front desk.

Bag packed, I switched on the room TV.
WELCOME MR. DOUBLE
. Good-bye, Mr. Double. The same stock photo of smiling Way Inn staff. Today's special in the restaurant: Thai green curry. Weather outlook: clouds and rain, the same symbol repeating into the future. No more. Maurice was right, I did need a holiday. I would go somewhere without a Way Inn, wherever that was. Katmandu, Timbuktu, a nameless corner of the world.

Using the remote control, I selected “hotel services” and “quick checkout.” An account of my room extras appeared: drinks from the minibar, phone calls, room service meals, dry cleaning. Do you accept? Yes. Charge my card. Proceed to checkout. A crude progress wheel appeared under the words
PLEASE WAIT
. Under the wheel:
TRANSACTION INCOMPLETE. DO NOT NAVIGATE AWAY FROM THIS PAGE
. Never reassuring, the progress wheel—unlike the progress bar, it doesn't progress, it just goes around and around. Its purpose is, I assume, merely to imply that something, somewhere, is working; that servers in sheds somewhere are talking to other servers in sheds elsewhere. But so often the wheels keep spinning over a completely stuck machine, like the wheel of an overturned car in a ditch beside the road.

“What are you doing?”

I jumped hard enough to provoke a squeak from the box mattress of the bed I was sitting on, and looked toward the door to see who had spoken. But there was no one there. A soft dry rattling came from the air-conditioning vent. There was movement on the screen—not the inane rotation of the wheel but, beside it, where the staff of the Way Inn flashed their shining smiles at me, radiating welcome and readiness to serve. Actors, maybe. The movement seemed to have come from the photo, from among the ranks of the staff—and as I looked, one of their number turned, edged sideways and stepped out of the immobile group. It was Hilbert, a small televised Hilbert, strolling across the red-and-white backing of the screen as if it were a stage.

“Bunch of stiffs,” tele-Hilbert said, looking back at the photo from which he had emerged. “Superficially pleasant, but lacking the human touch. So often the case nowadays. That's the difference between good service and great service, don't you agree, Mr. Double? The human touch.”

I mashed buttons on the remote, but nothing happened. Moiré patterns flared and blazed on Hilbert's suit as he walked slowly forward—toward what? Through what? There was no camera, this was a menu; toward the screen, then, toward me.

“Nowadays the hotel business is all about making an emotional connection—making the business traveller feel their soul is being taken care of as well as their body. Or faking it, anyway. Hence the quote from Michel de Montaigne on the cover of the service directory, hence the ostentatious environmental concern about towels, hence the email on your birthday. ‘We are delighted to look after your coats while you are enjoying our hospitality.'
Delighted
. Healthy living, too, the photo of the sliced kiwi fruit on the room service menu, the spa and fitness center.
Mens sana in corpore sano
, yes? A healthy mind in a healthy body. We all want to live forever.”

As he spoke he advanced on me. Blocky digital distortion, aliasing breakdowns, compression fragments, ragged swatches of acidic machine-green and machine-blue, inexpressible noncolors smearing red-black and purple-black, boiled at the crisp edge of his approaching form. He could not be resolved, not by the display technology, not by perceived reality. The pixel froth stirred up by his progress was the screen's rejection of him. But I was transfixed.

“Does the outer hotel care? It cares about appearing to care. It cares enough to make me sick, anyway. It wants your business, it wants your approval. But it doesn't know you the way the inner hotel knows you. Transaction incomplete, Mr. Double. Transaction incomplete.”

Hilbert's face filled the screen, pallid skin splitting with horizontal bars of bruise-colored digital interference. Distortion streamed from the open wound on his brow, where Dee had struck him with the chair. He was bleeding noise and chaos.

I overcame my paralysis and lunged for the off button on the TV itself; Hilbert turned as if able to see my arm—and the screen blinked to black.