The Way Inn (9 page)

Normally I would expect to hate these people. I would find their ease with one another and with me intolerable and I would want to be elsewhere. But at this time I appreciated their temporary inclusion of me in their group. It was reassuring—there would be thousands of people here who were unaware of my “unmasking” earlier, and who in all likelihood would care little if they heard of it. And this sense I felt of no longer being anonymous, no longer having to guard myself, was tantalizing. Much as I like to be unknown, I was drawn toward candor as if the ground sloped that way. Our ideology, as a business, was after all to ease the flow of information.

The clipboards were closer now. My new friend from the provincial chamber of commerce asked me: “What brings you here?”

“I'm a pirate,” I said.

He enjoyed that, immediately wading into what he imagined was a joke on my part. “Oh yeah? Where's your parrot, then?”

“Upstairs. Flat battery.”

“Eye patch?”

“Don't need one. Laser eye surgery. It's transformed piracy.”

He laughed. “What do you do then? Go around nicking other people's ideas, or what?”

“No, nothing like that. I'm a conference surrogate. If someone doesn't want to go to an event like this, they pay me to go instead. Some people consider that piracy.”

Chamber of commerce digested this. “Doesn't make a difference to us, I shouldn't think.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought.”

“So you go to conferences? That's all? Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Are there lots of conference surrogates?”

“As far as I know it's just me. But the company I work for wants to expand. Are you interested?”

“Not for me, mate,” he said. Perhaps concerned that my feelings were hurt, he quickly clarified his remark. “I mean, we go to four or five of these things a year and they're always a great time”—he looked toward his colleagues, who had hurled themselves deep into the party, and who were already dancing together—“but they're a getaway, you know? Something different. Doing nothing else would do my head in, quite frankly.”

I regarded him sympathetically. “I think it takes a particular kind of person,” I said.

A rare kind of person. We were past the PRs, and I excused myself, telling chamber of commerce that there were people I should say hello to, releasing him to rejoin his colleagues. It occurred to me that the reason I found it hard to mix with the people I saw every day was that I didn't see much of myself in them.

For the party, the hotel restaurant and bar had been combined—a sliding partition was all that separated them, and it had been pushed back to make one large space. Not for the first time, I admired the careful design of the hotel: its adaptability, its multiple possible configurations and reconfigurations, its promiscuity as a venue. Features refined through hundreds of repetitions of the same basic form. I took a glass of champagne from a passing tray, drained it swiftly, and found another, which I preserved. With this prop, I made an unhurried circuit of the room. The person I really wanted to see was Maurice—strange, after so long trying to avoid him—but his uncanny ability to manifest himself whenever I had no desire to see him had, it seemed, an unfortunate corollary: when actually needed, he was absent, or at least not apparent. There was free booze to be had, and he was nowhere. It defied reason.

The party was hosted by the Way Inn group and the promotional point was heavily made.
WAY INN WELCOMES MEETEX
read a banner that ran the length of the glass wall of the lobby. Fatty clusters of red balloons were suspended from the ceiling, each adorned with the Way Inn logo. In one corner a stand had been set up and a young woman sat behind it handing out fliers, USB sticks and ballpoint pens and other merch. I took a pen. A display related the history of the chain: America in the 1950s, giant cars, ranch-style motor courts, flamboyant neon-Aztec roadside signs, the development of the interstate highways. Then, nothing but growth, growth, growth—the end of the display, the end of history, was a map of the world freckled with red markers indicating Way Inn branches. Hundreds of markers on six continents, with coastal America and northwestern Europe completely obscured.
WAY INN EVERYWHERE
, read the closing caption.

It was approaching nine already—I had spent longer lounging in my room than I had realized. The party had been going more than an hour and the ice was well broken—the air pulsated with chatter, laughter and amplified music, as if this mutual sound was a medium in which we all swam. In this buoyant scene, I could usually pass unnoticed, and would be free to strike up promising conversations with any women who caught my eye. But more than once I suspected eyes were upon me, and, although I could not be certain, I felt I was not being regarded with favor. Finishing my second champagne, I started toward the bar, and a heavyset man going the other way blocked my path, forcing me to abruptly and ungracefully change course to avoid colliding with him; I could not help but believe that this was deliberate. The bar was mobbed—other drinkers trying to place their orders did not give me an inch of spare room or extend the slightest courtesy; twice someone pushed ahead of me. All of these individual incidents were barely incidents at all, but they disturbed me.

Having at last secured a whisky from the bar—a treble, to delay my return to the scrum for as long as possible—I set out to look for Maurice once more. The venue had filled noticeably in the preceding half hour. When I arrived, I had been able to saunter up and down the length of the room unobstructed, so that it was notable when someone contrived to get in my way; now we were all almost shoulder to shoulder and movement amid the throng was slow, a question of navigating narrow channels between knots of people, seeing gaps between pairs of turned backs and squeezing through. More than once, I was jostled, bumps that I feared might not have been pure accidents. Every aspect of the party was taking on an ugly complexion, and the crowds, malign or not, were sapping my energy. I was increasingly ready to leave, to take my drink up to my room and enjoy it in peace, when someone tapped me sharply on my shoulder. I was primed for the worst.

But when I turned, I saw a friendly smile. Its owner was Rosa (or Rhoda—my memory was no less impaired). She was wearing a very simple, almost austere, gray dress which clung attractively to her petite frame. Her smile was enhanced by light pink lipstick, and she had a decorative burst of tinselly metal pinned in her short hair.

“Neil!” she said. “I thought it was you.”

“Hi!” I said.

“Busy, isn't it?”

We pushed our way to one side of the space, near the windows overlooking the car park, a lacuna in the mass that gave us enough room to face each other.

“Lots of people here,” I said, uselessly.

“Nowhere else to go, right?” Rosa said, casting an eye to the window and the low brows of the cars beyond, streaked by rain and security lights. “Not much nightlife around here.”

“I don't know,” I said. “We could head down to the airport, there might be a Starbucks or an Irish pub there or something . . .”

She laughed. Her lips sparkled. Was it lipstick, or lip gloss? I am hazy on these crucial details. I wanted to kiss them, in any case. “Yeah, wild. We could hit the travel chemist and get wasted on antimalarial drugs. That stuff is mental.”

“See, now you're getting into it,” I said. Nonchalant: “Are you here with colleagues?”

“I was,” she said, “but they've disappeared. You on your own?”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, not entirely, no. I'm talking to you.”

“Did you have a good day?”

“Not really,” I said. A bit of vulnerability and candor would help me here, I calculated. “One of the sessions I attended turned out to be a premeditated attack on my business, and on me personally.”

“What, an attack on conference surrogacy?”

My glass almost slipped from my hand. The ball bearing of anxiety that had been spinning at high speed in my abdomen broke apart, sending splinters ripping through my viscera. She knew? How? Was it common knowledge already?

“You know about that?”

“I can imagine it wouldn't go down too well here. It's also a novelty, I suppose, and that can disturb people.”

“How did you hear about it?”

“Hear about what?”

“That I'm a conference surrogate. Who told you?”

“You told me,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You don't remember?”

I narrowed my eyes too, as if focusing the moment in my mind, which was in fact a total blank. I couldn't remember talking with Rosa at any length before, let alone telling her something like that. “No, no, sure,” I said.

“It's like you said,” Rosa continued. “Most of this business is just an exchange of information—sign-up information, name badges, business cards, publicity material, URLs. Names, addresses, job titles. It's nothing more than a big box for sorting information, the MetaCenter; they all know it, because they employ my company to harvest all that information, to build lists of names and email addresses and phone numbers, to rank and cross-reference and update. We already read bar codes and QR codes on name badges to access the data that you provided to Meetex when you signed up, so people know who's looking at their stand, and we collect and scan business cards, run them through text-recognition programs to strip out the data . . . soon enough everything will be chipped, we'll be reading the data automatically as you approach the stand. After that, who knows? Face recognition, iris recognition, gait recognition . . .” She had a very intent, thoughtful expression, still looking past me. It reminded me of the redhead, a coincidence that felt, nonsensically, like infidelity. “I don't think they object to you funnelling the information out of trade shows and conferences—what they hate is the fact that you're denying them information by allowing people to attend without being here. You're a black box.”

“How much do they care, truly?”

“You'd be surprised,” Rosa said. Her soliloquy on the magic of databasing had left her slightly flushed. “Personal data is currency. Treasure to be hoarded. You might as well be the scouting party for an advancing horde of barbarians, as far as they're concerned.”

“I don't feel that barbarous,” I said.

“You don't look at all barbarous to me,” she said. Full eye contact, smile—all very promising.

“How was your day?”

“Tedious,” she said. “Shall we skip this? I guess you don't want to talk business, and I don't want to either.”

“True,” I said.

“It's good to see you again too, you know,” she said. “You told me you were pleased to see me again, and I just wanted you to know I feel the same way.”

“That's good to hear,” I said. I confess, I did not expect this to go so well. There was little danger in pushing on to the next stage, as far as I could see. The next stage was an invitation, one it seemed I had been invited to make. “From what I've heard, all the important business takes place in hotel rooms, anyway. We're wasting our time down here.”

Something was wrong. Rosa frowned. “Yeah, so you say.” She had shifted her attention from me to behind me. “I think your friend wants you.”

I turned. Maurice was lurking behind my right shoulder.

“Sorry, chaps, chapess, I didn't quite know how to approach—almost gave Neil here a heart attack earlier, sneaking up behind him, didn't want to finish the job.” He had a beer in each hand. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Kind of,” I said, biting back my usual instinct to tell him to get lost. I needed his goodwill. If he took the hint and gave me a bit of space now I could catch up with him later.

“Sure, sure,” Maurice said, remaining solidly at my side. “Didn't mean to intrude. I don't think you introduced me to your friend earlier . . . ?”

“Right,” I said. He was looking to me for the introduction, not Rosa. He wanted me to do it. Anger writhed inside me. All the old-fashioned rubbish he spouted, it was nothing but an affectation! No one still behaved like that, not outside of a golf-club bar! Ask her! Ask her her name! “Maurice, this is . . .”

It was time to guess. Rosa felt probable—I still suspected Rhoda or Rhonda, but who was called Rhoda or Rhonda nowadays? It had to be Rosa. She had detected my hesitation—for a moment I thought she might step in and introduce herself, but instead she fixed her gaze on me, awaiting my answer with undisguised sternness.

“. . . This is my friend Rosa.”

“It's Lucy,” she said. Lucy—I felt the word as if it had cut from my genitals to my throat. Of course it was Lucy, and remembering this brought a peal of other memories, memories which might in other circumstances have been pleasant, but which now only amplified my errors. Not one error—many.

Maurice had extended his hand to the furious woman, but she ignored him. “Fucking hell, Neil. I didn't have any illusions after last time, I didn't think it was more than it was, just something we both wanted at the same time. But I thought you might at least remember it, and not use the exact same line on me . . .” she broke off from this salvo, delivered in an emphatic, vicious hiss, overcome by her anger and the scale of my malfeasance. Looking away from me, her faced cracked into a terrible, bitter smile, and her next words came with a breath that could have been a laugh, but for its complete lack of mirth. “. . . And to not even remember my name!”

“Jesus, look, I'm sorry—”

She cut me off. “No, forget it.” Savage it might have been, but her onslaught to this point had at least been discreet, surgically targeted at me. Now, however, her volume rose. “You don't give a shit about other people, you're completely wrapped up in your mystery-man fantasy. I can't believe I felt sorry for you.” Her eyes widened in astonishment at her own credulity—gray eyes. Despite what she was saying, I was struck again by how pretty she was. “You're pathetic. You deserve everything that's coming to you. Fuck you.”