The Way Inn (33 page)

It's an American chain of hotels, one that arrived in England in the early 1970s and has been expanding rapidly ever since. My twelve-year-old self understands at last. The memory gets a little richer, a little more detailed, as if it has access to better bandwidth. The plastic stirrer has a head shaped into the letters
WI
. I want to be able to intervene, to do the guiding that was never done.

And then my mother reappears. I don't remember if she said anything to me, but she took my hand with a firmness that neared the threshold of hurt and I was pulled from my chair and back out into the city. I don't remember which city. The juice was not even half finished—out of character for me, I had been saving it, savoring it, enjoying every freezing sip. My mother's face was wet and she quaked in an odd way, as if suppressing a laugh, but she was an epic, inconceivable distance from laughter. And I wasn't interested in what had upset her—instead I was furious, I wanted only to go back to that comfortable, solicitous place.

Later, though not much later, I understood that I had been just offstage for the terminal act of my parents' marriage. An incomprehensible psychic catastrophe had taken place in the realm of the adults and I had missed it. Like so much of childhood, all I had known on that day was random movement and unreadable motives, which to the grown-ups were transfers and dissolutions of lifetime importance. It took years to reassemble the pieces. But the frame, the hotel, was there from the start—the hotel was where adult things happened. It was the opposite of stifling, dreary childhood. It was the world beyond.

Although my mother never explained that day to me, she did, years later, try to explain her undimmed rage toward the man she had married, my father. I was expected to suckle all the explanation I needed from three words: he was unfaithful. And I couldn't: it wasn't enough. Even once I understood it on a technical level, even when I was able to infer that it wasn't a single deed but a history, a central element of his character, I couldn't endorse the severance on an emotional, visceral level. It was my mother I found myself struggling to forgive, not my father. She had ensured he would never return.

“Was my father with a woman that day?”

YES

“And my mother caught them together? In a Way Inn? In Way Inn?”

YES

And that was it, the central unanswered questions in my life given answers. Hotels were where adult things happened. Where I would no longer be bound by all the tedious restraints of childhood—its material privations, and my mother's sense of right and wrong, which had wronged me by depriving me of my father. I had rejected all that out of a desire to emulate that lost, seductive man. Even he had turned away from that life, and had been horrified by my success in becoming his image. But it was not too late to change course.

The sign crackled and
WAY INN VACANCIES
again burned red, obliterating the hotel's last answer to me.

“How do I find Dee?” I asked, forgetting to format my question, wanting—needing—something more than just affirmation or denial. “Can you show me?”

Nothing changed. The oracle had spoken. The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on. But Dee had implied that the hotel was always speaking to those guests that interested it, and the key was to listen. In the noise of everything that had happened to me, there was a signal, information that I had missed.

“You've already shown me, haven't you?” I said. “It's in front of me, isn't it? The way to Dee, the way out.”

The only answer was the electric fizz of the sign against the dawnless dusk. I turned my head to look out over the desert and listened to the rhythmic chirping of a cricket.

A cricket? Was there wildlife in this monstrous place? Even insect life struck me as unlikely. Within a hundred meters of the motel, the notional “surface” of the waste crawled like magma, and the distant hills moved and churned as slow as clouds. It was a bubbling mirage, not terrain. I didn't know what had felled those of Hilbert's colleagues who had left their remains out on that unreal tundra, but I was ready to guess that beyond this bubble of dilapidated Americana lay a realm fundamentally incompatible with life of our kind. A sound that should have been soothing, the sound of sun-scorched summer parks, started to saw away at my nerves. The pseudo-cricket's song was coming from behind me, from within the hotel.

I left my seat and walked back up the steps to the second-floor gallery, following the beat of the noise. It grew steadily louder—not a cricket, but a shrill electronic alarm, coming from the dark interior. I already knew which room to look in.

Two-nineteen was locked, but my black keycard opened it. Inside, the room was exactly as I had left it—as I had left it when I exited via the window hours previously. The television was still set to the
WELCOME MR. DOUBLE
screen, the telephone was still in pieces on the floor, surrounded by smithereens of safety glass. The bed had, as I guessed, been pulled into the middle of the room, its corner wedged under the window; I crossed to the empty frame and looked out. The same vacant lot, the same red lights on the misty horizon, the same drab fields. Down by the edge of Way Inn's plot a small figure was clambering over the orange plastic fence and, as I watched him, he turned and saw me in the window. Opposed mirrors, multiple reflections stretching away into nothingness—mirrors in time as well as space, weird extrusions and recursions in the hotel's bubble of exceptionality. Myself, I was looking at myself.

Fearing the implications of this sighting, I shrank back from the window. Strange loops, Möbius strips, closed circuits. The alarm, continuing to bleat away, was coming from the clock radio, which had been knocked off the bedside table when the bed had been yanked across the floor. I picked up the radio and hit snooze. The digital display read 3 33. If not a time, then a number. It had been whispered and screamed at me from the start.

Once again, Way Inn had changed what lay outside room 219. And I barely blinked. I was getting used to its habits at last. We were back to the usual décor, and the layout of the MetaCenter Way Inn. Turning left, I found the lifts and stairwell in the usual place, but the stairs led only up—a poured concrete floor had replaced the descending flight. But up was what I needed.

Room 333 looked the same as all the other rooms on the third floor, and all the other rooms on all the other floors. Just as its global sameness allowed Way Inn to expand freely—it was never a surprise to see a Way Inn, and they never promised anything surprising—I saw that it made it easy for determined individuals to hide in plain sight. And Dee was certainly determined—that had also been obvious from the start.

A
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hung from 333's doorknob. I listened at the door and heard, I believed, the rustling of someone within. Not being able to summon any alternative ideas, I knocked.

The rustling ceased. I knocked again.

Another bout of silence, then a voice from within: “Yes?”

For a fleeting instant I considered saying “housekeeping,” but to shovel more deception into this relationship would be a bad move. “It's Neil. Neil Double.”

A pause. “Go away.”

“I want to apologize. I really messed up. Hilbert had wheedled me into something I didn't understand. The last thing I wanted was to put you in danger.”

“Go away, Neil.”

“Please. You're still in danger, we both are. Hilbert is crazed. He's not serving the hotel anymore, he's on a personal crusade, and the aim is us, dead.”

No answer. I waited, but the silence was stubborn.

“How do you think I found you, Dee? The hotel told me where you are. It's helping me, not Hilbert. We have to work together.”

The black keycard was in my jacket pocket, and I felt its width between my fingers—that little bit of extra luxury, executive heft, pure display meant to flatter the holder. Would it open this door? Or would that merely bring Hilbert down on us? But as I considered using the keycard, the door opened.

Dee stood before me, wearing the same leather jacket and sweatpants as before, but Dangermouse had been ousted from the T-shirt by Joy Division.

“No Dangermouse?”

“Blood on it.” She stared at me, her words a reminder of my treachery, and a warning of the probable consequences if I wronged her again.

“I wouldn't recommend the dry-cleaning service here.”

Dee didn't reply, but stood aside to allow me through the door.

Room 333 was a mess. Not a degenerate mess like the rooms in the wasteland motel, but the habitat of a less-than-fastidious workaholic hermit. Desk and bed were thick with papers, mostly loose leaves torn from pads and covered with Dee's esoteric, geometric doodles and devices. There were other documents, too—misfolded hand-annotated maps, a couple of textbooks and paperbacks. More paper covered every wall, including the screen of the television: hundreds of printouts of photographs of the abstract paintings. Dee's tablet was slotted into a tiny clearing on the desk and attached to a keyboard and stylus pad. The paintings shifted and shuffled without a pause on its screen, having their edges matched and their vectors plotted.

As the armchair was stacked with room service trays, I sat on a free corner of the bed.

“I've seen the inner hotel, Dee,” I said. “The hotel won't let me out, but it did let me
in
. I've seen the motel. I spoke to the neon sign. It answered my questions.”

“I've seen the motel,” Dee said, a note of injured pride in her voice, as if she was anxious to stress that she had seen it first, or irked that I had found it at all. I was privately pleased with this reaction—it was human. “There are some dark places in the inner hotel, darker even than that.”

“I'm sure,” I said. “Look, I don't doubt you know the inner hotel better than I do, that's why I'm here. The hotel won't let me leave. But I think it will let us leave together.”

In my peripheral vision, an arabesque uncurled across the pictures stuck to the wall, and evaporated when I tried to focus on it; a fleeting impression of a larger interconnection. I found myself unable to trigger it again. Disquieted, I looked away, picking up the book my left hand had been resting on.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
by Douglas Hofstadter, battered and fringed with bookmarks like all Dee's books. It was unknown to me, but before I could flip it over to read the back, Dee snatched it out of my hands.

“Do you mind?” She started to gather up the papers around me, piling them without apparent system.

“Escher—the guy who did the endless staircases and upside-down castles? Fits right in here.”

“Maurits Cornelis Escher.”

“Maurice?”

She ignored me and continued to collect her papers, stuffing them into her giant shoulder bag.

“I spoke to the hotel,” I repeated. “It answered my questions.”

“It can be pretty chatty when it wants to be,” Dee said, without warmth or very much in the way of sincerity. “I put it down to mostly having to deal with psychopaths. And aeons of loneliness.”

“It said Hilbert was going to kill me,” I said. “So we have that in common.”

“Congratulations. What else did it say?”

“It said that you knew the way out. That if I found you, I would find the way out. And that it had been shielding you from Hilbert.”

“Well, babe, I'm afraid it might be wrong about that.”

This worried me—I realized that up to this point my faith in Dee's ability to extract me from the hotel had been total. Way Inn's ability to reshape reality had impressed me so greatly that I had assumed, without good reason, that its pronouncements would be infallible. But what if it was capable of error? And why shouldn't it be capable of mendacity?

“We should at least try,” I said, sensing the weakness in my voice.

Dee didn't reply. Working with frantic haste, she had cleared all the papers and books from the bed into her bag, and had moved on to plucking the photos from the walls, quickly and without care. As she took the pictures from the gridded positions, again I thought I saw something in their interrelations—not a simple continuation from one image to another, but a sense of harmony. But it was gone at the moment of my noticing.

“Don't tidy up on my behalf,” I said. “I'm sorry to intrude. I know it's not like you were expecting visitors.”

“I'm not tidying,” she said. “I'm leaving.” A shake of the head, eyes closed. “Fleeing, really.”

“Fleeing?” For crucial seconds the word made no sense to me, as if an archaism like
jousting
had dropped unexpectedly into the conversation. “What?”

“You're an idiot, Neil,” Dee said with a kind of bitter amusement. “I like you in a way—God knows why—but you're an idiot. You wander around in the inner hotel, Hilbert's domain, his place of business, and you don't even wonder where he is? Why he hasn't pounced? You might think he's crazy but you can't imagine he's stupid. He's more than capable of biding his time. He'll wait.”

“Wait? For what?”

Dee smiled—a sad, pitying smile. “Wait for you to find me. Then he has us both.”

While she spoke, a chesty rattle had arisen in the air conditioning, and when she stopped it became a deep, far-dragged moan as if answering her.

“Shit.”

“Major reconfiguration of hotel pseudofabric, and close,” Dee said. She had cleared the walls and desk, leaving behind Blu-Tak acne and a stuffed bin, and was now topping off her bag with the few clothes in the room. “Air is forced through the system. Like a Tube train coming.”

“He's coming.”

This time, Dee's smile to me was a crazed grin—no fear, only exhilaration. “Oh yes, he's coming. Coming round the mountain.”

The radio-alarm on the bedside table shrieked with interference, a wail like nothing in nature. breaking down into agonized chattering.