The Way Inn (32 page)

My foot struck something hard, breaking my reverie. It was a smooth, pale stone a little smaller than my fist, oddly clean of the dirt it rested on. The sort of rubble I imagined a diligent farmer would have combed from his fields. But a couple of steps farther along there was another, egg-like and incongruous. Others were in view, and as I walked their number steadily increased until it was hard to move forward without stepping on them. They filled the field's furrows and were soon numerous enough to bury the soil altogether. I was left stumbling across a plain of pebbles. Was this a natural landscape or part of an agricultural process I had never encountered? How had it come about? The stone field stretched away as far as I could see to my left and right, and ahead was marked only by a shadowy growth. None of this was the product of nature, surely—indeed, the stones looked as if they had been selected for consistency and raked level.

I altered my course slightly to head toward the dark outcropping that was the only nearby feature in the stone field. Since breaking out of the hotel I hadn't seen any sign of human activity. By any logical configuration of terrain I should have encountered the old road long ago. Assuming I had been keeping a straight line roughly parallel with the motorway, as had been my intention, I would have encountered it within minutes. Thinking on it, where was the motorway? Its roar, once inescapable, had faded, and there was no orange glow to my right.

The red lights were constant, though, and some order was visible in their arrangement as I drew closer. Some regularity was cohering on the horizon itself—it was not an indistinct blur but a roofline, a suggestion of a long, low building, exactly the kind you might find near an airport.

What I reached first, though, was simpler: the outcropping, which revealed itself to be nothing more than a large, flat boulder, groomed and smooth. Still, it offered an elevation of a foot or two above the stone field, so I climbed onto it to see if that advantage offered any better insight into my surroundings. From above, I could see the small pale pebbles had been arranged in concentric rings around the boulder, radiating from it like frozen and elegant ripples. Like the patterns in a Zen meditation garden.

Exactly like that.

The long, low building filled the horizon. It was the horizon. Four storeys, off-white cladding panels, a grid of tinted windows. The red lights were on the roof of this groundscraper. They were not for navigation or for warning aircraft, they were letters.

WAY INN
.

Another hotel? No. The same hotel.

I was still inside the hotel.

At once, it was obvious. What I had imagined to be the outdoors was nothing more than an immense courtyard, surrounded on all sides by Way Inn. My escape had been an illusion, a mere stroll in one of the hotel's interminable inner lacunae.

I sat on the rock and stared at the looming cliff face of the hotel, hollowed out by this discovery. Maybe there was nothing more than this—everything I knew, every place I had been, was no more than a tolerated aberration in the uniform, porous structure of Way Inn. The entirety of reality revealed as nothing more than a mote floating in a hotel courtyard. There was no way out, only ways deeper in.

A single fire door punctuated the windowless ground floor of the hotel, and it had been left ajar. An invitation, a taunt. Come back inside. Where else is there to go?

Inside the door, however, all was not quite as I expected. I was not in one of the typical ground-floor spaces, but instead a long, bare corridor with white-painted breezeblock walls and a poured concrete floor that made loud echoes of my footsteps. This sparse avenue was lit by plain fluorescent strips which buzzed and blinked, turning piecemeal sections of the path ahead momentarily dark, as if the corridor was holding itself in the realm of the real only by force of a titanic, unseen act of will. There were no doors to try, just occasional abstract paintings, and I heard the fire door slam closed behind me. For the second time, I rued not leaving a door propped open, but I doubted I could have made any lasting difference to the behavior of an aperture the hotel wanted closed. It decided where I could go and I would be deluded if I thought otherwise. My desire to escape was purely ornamental now—what propelled me forward was a grim form of curiosity, a bleak interest in what Way Inn had arranged for me.

The corridor terminated in an anonymous black door with no number on it. I tried the handle and it opened easily. On the other side was more corridor—but again, there was a variation on the familiar pattern. This portion of the hotel was only dimly lit and the impeccable minimal décor of a global chain was gone, replaced with kitschy 1950s Americana. The carpet was night blue and woven with a design of stylized yellow stars. The pattern was repeated on the wallpaper, but inverted—tiny blue pinprick stars on a yellow background. The exact color scheme was hard to make out as the only light had a reddish tinge, and was cast from a source farther down the corridor. And while the hotel had previously showed the same flawless standard of maintenance wherever I went, here it had let its standards slip. The carpet was worn through to its burlap structure in patches and the wall-paper was loosening and stained. Only the paintings looked as they did elsewhere—and I was struck by the atemporality of their design, the way they fitted into this retro environment as well as they had everywhere else.

Where had I come from to get here? I looked and saw without much surprise that the door I had used was numbered 219. In one direction, the corridor advanced into darkness; the other way was toward the arterial red glow. Toward the glow, then.

Many of the rooms I passed were open, and looking in them I saw I had missed the party of the century. Empty miniatures bottles lay thick on the floors and glass Manhattans had been built on the surfaces of the period furniture. Ashtrays overflowed with cold cigar butts and lipstick-stained cigarette ends. The sheets on the beds were twisted and splashed. Furniture was smashed and clothing, male and female, was everywhere, often torn. An airless blow-up doll was draped over one of the televisions, analogue snow showing through the translucent pink plastic of its abdomen. All the rooms had small, ancient televisions, and all were switched to empty channels, casting shivering blue static shadows across these depopulated scenes of debauchery. The air was tainted with stale tobacco smoke, sour sweat and evaporated dregs of liquor; and those odors masked a deeper waft of corruption—decay of bodies, of buildings, of minds.

After twenty or thirty meters the corridor opened up on one side, becoming a gallery or mezzanine overlooking a courtyard. I paused at the iron railing, its yellow paint measled with rust, and looked down on a defunct kidney-shaped swimming pool, its dry bottom choked with rubbish. The sky was a dull bronze and lacked a basic ingredient of sky-ness; I knew it had never been warmed by a sun. What illuminated the courtyard and sent bloody shadows into the corridor was a giant neon sign, standing like a totem pole at the open end of the U of buildings.

WAY

INN

NO

VACANCIES

Three of those words were lit, humming red; the no was unpowered. Vacancies, of course.

I was a moth to this sign. In thrall to a compulsion I could not understand, I descended the staircase at the end of the mezzanine. The sign was a classic from the post-War golden age of the American motor hotel, designed to be seen by travellers in chrome-dazzled shark-finned cars driving along newly built interstate highways. The lettering of
WAY INN
was elaborate, suggestive of copperplate and California, an early branding scheme that had been abandoned long ago. Before it had been homogenized by corporate identity consultants. This was Way Inn back when it was small, local, quirky, before it became a global behemoth. Why had it preserved this relic of itself, sequestered deep in the inner hotel? Unguessable sentimentality? And why, then, let it get trashed? Was this a hideaway for Hilbert and his kind; one of the silent, secret places he alluded to?

As I walked across the courtyard, I kicked empty miniatures and beer cans into the pool. A couple of inches of coffee-black liquid lingered at the pool's lowest point, and its diving board was encrusted with brown stains. Among the bottles and cans floating in the filthy residue was a long, blond wig. The white webbing of the poolside recliners sagged on rusting frames. Pornographic magazines from four decades were strewn here and there. Party hats and strings of plastic beads. Syringes. A silent place, yes—apart from the dead sky, what made this mystery motel uncanny was the total hush that surrounded it like a moat; not the contented quiet of the countryside, but an anechoic void of terrifying nullity. All that could be heard, apart from my own shuffling, clattering steps through the litter, was the buzz of the mighty neon sign.

The sign—it was why I was here. It was what I had been brought here to see. And I was not the first. Burned-out candles ringed the metal pillar that supported the neon letters, and inscrutable patterns had been scrawled in chalk and spray paint on the concrete. What a shabby place Hilbert's utopia turned out to be—a shitty dead end where there was nothing to do but get wasted and screw, a world without limits limited to the low-grade pleasures of a motel. Not a constant cocktail party but an eternal lost weekend, raiding a bottomless minibar and sweating under a sunless dome.

And beyond the motel, nothing. A Martian desert marked by patches of black scrub. No, not scrub: bodies, dark-suited, scattered in the wasteland behind the sign. No water in the pool, nothing on TV, no highway, nowhere to go, and only one really sure way to check out.

A couple of armchairs, removed from the rooms, sat facing the sign. I sat in one and gazed up at the crackling red neon.

“Hello,” I said.

The sign did nothing.

“I'm looking for a sign,” I said. “Are you the sign?”

The sign went dark. But not wholly dark—three of its letters were still lit, the
Y
of way and the
ES
at the end of vacancies.

YES

“Am I alive or dead?”

The
YES
disappeared, leaving the motel forecourt in night, its outlines only barely perceptible against the hellish bronze firmament.

“Yes or no only, huh?”

YES

“Am I dead? Did Hilbert kill me?”

The
NO
of
NO VACANCIES
lit up. No, not dead. That was good. It was a start.

“Does Hilbert want to kill me?”

YES

“Is there a way out?”

YES

“So I can get out?”

YES

“Where? How?”

The sign died.

“Yes or no, right. OK.” I tried to reformulate what I wanted to ask. “Will I find the way out?”

NO

“Does Dee know the way out?”

YES

“So if I find Dee, I'll find the way out?”

YES

“Do you know where Dee is?”

YES

“It's you, isn't it? You're shielding Dee from Hilbert.”

YES
I could just about see it now—at every stage the hotel had directed me toward Dee. And Hilbert's interventions had driven us apart again. I had assumed that Hilbert was working on instructions set by the hotel—but what if he wasn't? What if he was the servant who was no longer proving reliable, who could no longer hear the voice of his master, his sanity bending and fracturing under the strain of his long acquaintance with infinity? He had direct contact with his god, and it was destroying him, as it would destroy any man. All at once I was ambushed by an emotion: pity. Not pity for Hilbert, but pity for the hotel, forced to rely on such delicate, breakable creatures as we humans. A race that had been given the powers of a god, and used that power to build a chain of hotels. Maybe other, more inspired species were making towering, epic use of the Way Inn elsewhere, fashioning palaces and libraries, utopias and total artworks. Not us; we built a hotel, and limited our expressions of pride to the make of coffee brewed in the lobby.

Inadequacy took me, a sucking wave drawing the sand out from under my feet. I was in the presence of an oracle, perhaps on the slopes of Olympus itself, able to ask and be answered. And all I could think about was the immediate conundrum facing me, the question of evading Hilbert.

“Do you know the meaning of life?”

NO

Too much to ask. The hotel's brush-off didn't mean life was meaningless, merely that it didn't know the answer. And why should it? I could plumb a lesser mystery. But what was there?

“Can I help you at all, madam?”

“Watch my son, please.”

“Are you a guest at the hotel?”

“My husband is. Watch my son, I'll be back shortly.”

I am sitting on a black leather armchair that is far too large for me. My feet do not touch the ground. The man who had spoken to my mother, who wore a red waistcoat with shiny silver buttons and white shirtsleeves, leaned down to my level.

“What's your name?”

“Neil,” I said.

“Would you like some juice, Neil?”

“I would like that.” My mother was nowhere to be seen. The theater with the silver tray and the little disc of layered paper was acted out for me. I could ask for things and they would appear, and they would appear with panache. Although I was alone, I felt safe. After that agonizing train journey through a flame-racked world, I am warm and people are smiling at me and bringing me drinks.
This is a hotel
, I thought, and I know that I like hotels.

Big ice cubes, the biggest I've ever seen. “The Americans like their ice.” Something my father said. It had been cryptic to me when he said it. Americans? We were in England. But here was a glass of big American ice cubes. There was a plastic scepter I could use to move them around.