The Way Inn (31 page)

The card worked in the lock, the light turned green and the door opened. It was gloomy inside, and I moved the card to the wall slot to bring on the lights. No hesitation—I could hardly prevent Hilbert or the hotel doing as they pleased, so let them come.

Housekeeping had been. The bed was made, the bin had been emptied. On the bed was my bag, neatly aligned on the ostentatiously smooth and tight-cornered sheets. The television facing the bed had come on with the lights; on the screen was the default hotel menu.
WELCOME MR. DOUBLE
. It was as if I had just checked in, as if my bags had been brought up for me and all I had to do was unpack and make myself comfortable. To put my toothbrush in the bathroom and eat the complimentary chocolate. To explore the minibar and browse the pay-per-view movies. As if nothing had happened.

I went to the phone and punched zero, for reception. A single ring and the call was answered.

“I'm in room 219,” I said. “I want to check out, immediately.”

“So soon?” It was Hilbert. His voice purred with concern and the sibilant electromagnetic breath of the phone line agreed. “Your account has not been settled, Mr. Double. Services have been rendered and the hotel has not been compensated. There are numerous extras on your bill. Way Inn takes a dim view of guests reneging on their commitments.”

The subsidence in my stomach deepened as I watched exits disappear. But as I slid down into dread and my options dwindled, I felt the return of something I thought lost for good: fury. The final fury of the cornered animal, perhaps, but still a motivating fire. Had Hilbert been in the room with me, I would have smashed the phone into his face with the purest pleasure. Denied this, I was reduced to snarling at him: “How about I set this fucking room on fire? How would that affect my account, huh?”

“I think we both know you are not going to do that.”

Damn him, he was right—it was little more than an empty threat, and we could both see it. I had no matches or lighter with me, and the days when they could be found in any hotel room are long gone. Was there some way to make a spark by smashing a bulb or damaging one of the appliances? I could plug in the clock radio and chuck it into a full bath—but what would that achieve, really? Would it start a fire? More likely it would only blow a fuse and I might electrocute myself in the attempt. Hilbert's words about suicide returned to me, how the act had been considered by the hotel designers. Recessed light fittings, nowhere to attach a ligature, a jumpy fuse box, windows that don't open. These measures protected the desperate from themselves, but also protected the hotel from the desperate. Desperate men like me, unable even to make fire, reduced to a lower level than our Neolithic ancestors.

I did not speak.

“Please wait,” Hilbert said. “Someone will be with you shortly.”

There was a click, and silence—not true, natural silence, but the detectable electronic non-sound that indicated I was listening to a machine. Then, music: an instrumental, sambafied version of “Paint It Black.”

I was on hold. He had put me on hold. It was hard to believe, and hard to imagine a greater insult. No, I wasn't going to calmly stand by for his arrival, and I certainly wasn't going to spend that time in Muzak limbo. No more waiting around, no more fatalism. The fury flowed through my viscera and brought heat to my neck and jowls. In a sharp movement, I yanked the handset away from the phone, meaning to detach it or pull the jack from the wall. Instead the phone fell to the floor, from where I kicked it against the wall with precisely targeted power. Its beige plastic casing fractured. The handset, still in my hand, erupted with a synthetic siren noise, a designed note of agony, the sound of warranties being voided and consumer rights being forfeited. Taking the coiled flex in both hands, I pulled on it like I was starting a motorboat. The complaints from the handset ceased with its separation from the phone.

It felt good to attack the hotel, to physically damage part of it, no matter how minuscule the blemish I made on its face. I wanted more. Maybe I was a condemned man wrecking his cell, but wreck it I would. And I knew what to strike next—all I needed was a tool.

Nothing could be found in the bathroom, only tiny soaps and doll's-house bottles of shampoo. A sewing kit came as part of this little collection of courtesy objects, but was hopeless. If I smashed the mirror it might yield a deadly shard or two, but I feared it would prove deadly first and only to me. The wardrobe in the bedroom offered only featherweight slippers, a hair dryer and a shoehorn. Hilbert's suit was gone—a symbol of the offer Hilbert had made to the vile, sightless part of me I had let grow in my inward darkness over the years. The part that had been so close to taking me entirely, and which was well suited to Way Inn, well suited indeed. But the suit had disappeared, maybe reclaimed with my rejection of that offer.

The hanger that supported the suit was topped with a flat-ended spike, rather than a hook, that slotted into an irremovable ring on the rail. That spike, though utterly blunt, might just work. I took one of the hangers and felt it in my hand—yes, it could work. The painting in my room was like all the others, a treacle wave lifting over a caramel field and retreating nutmeg spheres. I raised the hanger like a hand ax and brought it down on the center of the canvas. Despite its flat head, the spike went clean through. Pulling the hanger down, it was easy to rip a long gash into the canvas, down to the bottom edge of the wooden frame. Again. Again. I made three long downward tears in the painting, the second and third on either side of the first. Then I tried to slash across it, before hacking randomly at the disintegrating fabric until it was nothing more than limp ribbons, and scraps of it littered the carpet around my feet. Finally a blow struck the wire holding the painting—now an empty rectangle trailing brown bunting—to the wall. It hit the ground with a thud and fell against my legs; disgusted, unwilling to sully my hands, I kicked it away, then anchored it with one foot and lashed at it with the other until the frame cracked at the corners.

My purpose had ebbed as the painting was reduced. At first my instinct had seemed so pure and proud—to do violence against the hotel. But I was left feeling foolish, an infant throwing an impotent tantrum for an implacable adult. This was stupid; worse, it was a criminal waste of time when I should be devoting my resources to escaping the hotel or readying myself for Hilbert's arrival. Way Inn had mesmerized me like a desert rodent confronted by a predator. Having seen its inner immensities and experienced its vexing ability to revise those spaces to suit its ends, I had quite simply jettisoned any real hope of being able to outwit it or slip around its palisades. To be in the hotel was to be subject to it.

There was outside, though. Beyond the emerald-tinted window was the same view there had been from the start: the vacant lot adjoining the Way Inn, the unfinished, ready-ruined hotels and the drab fields behind in the underachieving light of a failed afternoon. On the horizon the cluster of red lights and the equipment of the airport. It was all there, right there. I didn't have to check out or call a cab or any of that—I could just walk across the fields and it wouldn't be long until I reached the airport's perimeter fence. There was no missing it. The worst that could happen was getting picked up by the police or airport security, and that was no threat at all. A warm car piloted by earthly authority.

The window was sealed—against noise, against the uncontrolled weather, against the unconditioned air, against suicide. It was thick, composed of three layers of high-performance glass, and it had small print in its corner boasting of its qualifications and fortitude and the lofty standards it met.

I took the bent-steel chair from behind the desk—the same model Dee had used to beat down Hilbert, an omen I was counting on—and tested its weight. How much force would I need to shatter the window? Would I be up to the job? It was hard to tell—but trying would be good practice for any later effort to repel Hilbert. I held the chair by the back, as she had held it, and tried to line up my shot. Part of me was excited by the prospect of this deliberate act of destruction, and wanted to properly revel in it. Another part was filled with fear—fear I might not be up to the task, and fear of what the consequences might be if I succeeded. Images of explosive decompression, of bodies sucked from disintegrating jets, flashed through my mind.

My first swing caused the chair to bounce harmlessly off the glass with a weird, flat
crack
that sent a voltaic shock of pain up my right arm. A bad move, all the wrong muscles thrown into it at the wrong time. But my body was learning. The next swing was much better—fluid, coordinated, a useful distribution of energies—but still the window didn't give. It gave, in fact, on the third impact, breaking in its entirety into a frost of tiny fragments, but staying in its frame. I kept at it, smacking away to get through the second and third layer, tiny crumbs of emerald shrapnel flying like rice at a wedding, until the exterior pane, which had bulged out like a crystal blister, popped from its moorings and fell with a muted crash to the concrete two storeys down.

A cold wind pushed into the room and animated the curtains, bringing with it a taste of rain. The taste of outside, beyond Way Inn's regimented climate. But I wasn't free yet. I was on the second floor—too far to drop without breaking bones, or worse.

I set about stripping the bed, rolling the sheets diagonally into thick cords and knotting them together at the ends. This was something I had seen done only in comics and films, and even doing it for real had a surreal air; and the fact that it produced a serviceable rope which I could use to escape injected verity into those screen and frame fantasies in an almost unwelcome way. The hotel's myriad impossibilities were hard enough to cope with, and now I discovered unsuspected realism in the realm of Road Runner. The thought made me smile as I worked, and I could see the Looney Tunes side of Way Inn itself—painted doorways that become real, the hotel's paradoxical circuits and dead ends, its infinity as a looped background, the same details racing past a character as they run, legs a-blur, on the spot.

When my makeshift rope was complete, I anchored it to one of the legs of the bed and threw the loose end out of the window. Without hesitating long enough to allow doubts to germinate, I slung my bag over my shoulder, wrapped the sheet around my hand and under my arms, and climbed onto the window ledge.

As soon as I gave up my footing on the floor, the drop to the ground looked twice as severe. Fragments of glass crunched under my feet and fell over the edge. My confidence in my plan wavered—it was a lot of faith to put in the physics of Saturday-morning cartoons.

I leaned out, moving my center of gravity into space, letting the sheet take more and more of my weight. It felt secure. The chill in the air was welcome, calming me. I planted my feet against the wall of the hotel and started to walk down.

The first unwelcome surprise was the level of strain on my arms, which felt ready to pop out of their sockets. The second was the trouble I had keeping my feet gripped to the hard, slippery cladding panels that comprised Way Inn's outer surface. Plastic, anodized zinc, high-performance laminate—whatever the substance was, I was not wearing the shoes for it. As I inched my way down, a portion of me screamed to speed up, to get it over with—but every aspect of the operation was tenuous indeed, a hair from betraying me, and the only progress I permitted myself was achingly slow.

Then the impatient part of me got its wish. I fell. In a single scrambling second the rope gave way and I dropped two or three feet. My feet lost their purchase and flailed out, and I swung on the rope like Tarzan before slamming into the window of the room beneath mine. I almost let go of the rope altogether. But the fall stopped and my tether regained its security as suddenly as it had lost it. For long moments I did nothing but hang there, feeling my heart hammering in my chest, thanking my lucky stars for its continued beating, and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It was, I guessed, the bed—my weight had been enough to pull it across the room, giving me that sickening taste of free fall.

With some ungainly scrabbling, I reclaimed my footing and resumed my descent. The pain in my side from the impact had not eased; sharp edges rubbed against soft tissues. A cracked rib, perhaps. The bones and sinews in my hand were being steadily crushed by the sheet wrapped around it. But down I went, and within a few minutes I was standing on the ground.

A chain-link fence blocked any direct path to the hotel access road, and the vacant lot next door was sealed off by glossy hoardings. But that was the way I needed to go, running roughly parallel to the access road, toward the airport beacons. I walked toward the rear of the hotel, past wheelie bins and fire doors. The hoarding along the edge of the site soon gave way to scrappy orange plastic fencing mesh strung between rebar spikes hammered into the ground. This I could just step over. And like that I was free. I took a last look back at the Way Inn, its tinted windows mute but for the shattered one trailing knotted white sheets. A dark figure stood in that vacant frame, thrown into silhouette by the lights of the room behind him.

Had anything ever grown in the fields behind the hotels? It was tough to imagine any green springing from that hard, sterile sod. They had been ploughed into neat corduroy furrows but showed no evidence of vegetable life beyond specks of weed. Between the fields ran shallow, straight drainage ditches rather than charming hedgerows. I saw no machinery, no farm buildings, no animals, no trees. Nothing but the gray horizon and its beckoning red lights.

When my mother and I made our last trip together to see my father, farmers still razed their fields after harvest. Trains would pass through clouds of black smoke rising from a landscape being scoured by snaking ribbons of orange flame. At the end of the year, the world was ceremonially destroyed. I watched from the window seat, perhaps the only person paying attention to the scene—an unnoticed, unremarked catastrophe unfolding in plain sight. But it gave me a focus that was not my mother. She had rebuffed my childish efforts at conversation and the questions I asked about that unexpected journey. I had been fed monosyllables and silence—a silence that concealed great movements and realignments I was not to be told about, the silence generated by a woman forming resolutions. Even at that young age, I knew better than to push my luck and demand answers or entertainment. I wanted very much to think of some combination of words that might break the spell that held my mother since she had made three phone calls that morning. Innocuous phone calls, simple queries to hotels as she tried to find out where my father was staying. The third call had ended abruptly. Then we had left the house for the railway station. I never found the words that broke that spell, so instead I was left with the view. Burning fields: a renewal, but to me it resembled Hell.