The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  The train swayed gently on the tracks. It woke the goats from their sleep. Clare wandered toward unconsciousness, her mind circling back to something she had witnessed the week before Richard died. She happened to be standing at a window when she saw him returning from his evening walk. The street was dark and he was visible to her only when he passed under the beam of a streetlight—vanish, appear, vanish, appear—but still she was certain of what she saw: he was walking the same as he had before the great change took hold, brisk and impatient, no time for anything but his own progress through the night.

  She had witnessed this sight and felt relieved. Whatever it was he had been going through, he was starting to come out of it. Maybe he would be fine.

  She now wondered if, on this walk, he had been thinking the same thing about her.

  Eight days later he was dead.

  * * *

  Somewhere in the province of Matanzas, Clare opened her eyes to a train car dark and careening.

  The seats shook. The windows rattled like loose teeth. A suitcase plummeted from the overhead rack and smashed open, spilling wrinkled clothes and Polaroid photos that took flight around the car.

  The train heaved, hurling bodies against seatbacks, and then stilled. A throb clustered in the center of her forehead. Clare felt her face and her stomach and her knees. She felt around the window; a Polaroid was stuck to the glass. She peeled it away. Not enough light to make out an image. For what felt like a long time, no one tried to escape the car. The passengers sat panting inside the pitch-darkness, as though everyone was afraid that if they moved the train might answer in kind.

  Finally the woman sitting in front of Clare broke the stillness. She stood, a hand outstretched, grasping at shadow. Soon more passengers rose to their feet and stumbled down the unlit aisles, stepping over bags and yanking open doors. One woman crawled through an open window; Clare saw her ankles kicking before she tumbled out and onto the earth. Adults in the train passed children to adults on the ground. She smelled smoke. She was afraid to leave her seat. She watched a man break a lock on a door with a small ax.

  Across the aisle, an old man struggled to rise. With her father, she had become practiced at shouldering the weight of a grown man (and there would be much more practice to come) and so for once she knew what to do. She squatted beside him. He was folded over in his seat, murmuring a name. She lashed herself to his body, fingers laced across his breastbone, elbows tight against his ribs. His underarms wet and hot on her skin. She pulled and up he went.

  Outside two women in skirts rushed toward Clare and the stranger leaning against her. They took his hands and led him away. She watched the women pat his snowy head, lick their fingers and wipe his face, in the manner of adults working to make a child presentable. His daughters. A wind shook the trees. People stood in huddles, or sat on the ground, in the dull glow of travel-size flashlights and lanterns and cell phone screens and moon. Her hearing felt muted, as though they were all underwater. Night bugs rose from the grass, flitting through streams of light. She noticed a few passengers taking videos on their phones.

  The front car had vaulted from the tracks, twisted like a head on a freshly broken neck, and now the entire machine sat steaming in the night. A derailment, though it could have been much worse.

  Clare could not make herself stand still, she walked circles in the grass, she kept grabbing at the front of her shirt, the straps of her pack. She watched the two women lead their father through the grass and over a hill. Other passengers had taken to walking down the tracks. A man carrying a briefcase vanished into the night, and as Clare watched his leaving, an even more radical form of movement began to seem possible, one that meant she would never be heard from as Clare again, offering instead a name that would fill people with the slight suspicion that it was not, in fact, her own.

  * * *

  She noticed a man in a dark suit sitting in the grass, smoking a cigarette and reading a book, aided by a tiny flashlight. She recognized his posture, his heavy mustache. She felt certain he was reading The Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, but as she drew closer she saw that he was wearing a crew member’s uniform and reading a dense manual titled Protocolos de Emergencia, turning the pages with urgency.

  Emergency protocols.

  On a small rise, a woman in a khaki dress and a baseball cap waved a miniature American flag; people were congregating around her. The gathering people hugged each other, rested hands on shoulders. Clare walked over to the group, counting packs of all kinds: backpacks, fanny packs, hip packs. A woman thrust her phone to the sky, in search of a signal, a circular neck pillow fastened to the straps of her shoulder bag. A tour group had been riding on the train.

  At the Seahorse, someone would occasionally turn up at the complimentary continental breakfast who was not a guest. One woman, a local, slipped by three times before Clare’s parents caught on. She wore a white terrycloth dress and a gold ankle bracelet, her shoulders pink from the sun. Clare’s mother had said she really looked the part. It was remarkable, truly, what appearance could make permissible.

  Clare fixed herself to the outskirts of the group. It was a large tour, maybe forty people, all touching each other, all chattering on. She would draw no attention. When the guide led them away from the train, Clare followed, over the tracks, down a sloped dirt road, and into a pair of waiting vans.

  A quick headcount, no extra seats. If left standing she would be outed. She hurried straight to the back of the van and into the tiny bathroom. She sat on the toilet seat and locked the door. The walls shuddered as the van drove away.

  Through the door she heard a man and a woman arguing over whether they could now finally agree that there was such a thing as too much authenticity.

  The vans dropped them in a dark square, not far from the sea, the air bowed with water. They were in a town on the coast, Clare did not catch the name. They followed the guide to a small hotel. While the room keys were being given out, Clare slunk up the stairs, past a black-and-white cat, a real one this time. The tip of its tail flicked back and forth. The cat paused in front of Clare and flashed its teeth, the incisors sharp as needles.

  * * *

  In the hotel by the sea, there were no elevators. No bar. She considered what kind of elevator she would have advised for this place: perhaps a birdcage installed with UltraRope, so it would look old but go very fast. In a hallway on the third floor, she found a rotary phone sitting on a stool. She would station herself here, and if anyone passed, she could pretend to be making a call. She picked it up and listened to the dial tone. She slid down the wall, the earpiece pressed against her chest. At two in the morning, she dialed her parents’ number, collect.

  Hello, her mother answered. What’s wrong.

  That was how her mother had been answering any calls that came in after ten, ever since Clare had phoned in the middle of the night to tell her Richard had been killed. Hello. What’s wrong.

  She listened to her mother breathe on the phone. She imagined a polished surface, reflecting and reflecting. At least her mother had always kept her secrets to herself. She had not ever asked her child to carry them.

  It’s me, Clare said.

  It’s the middle of the night, her mother said. Are you all right?

  Clare wondered if her father knew how furious she was. How furious she had tried not to be. How furious she would become. Who could ask such a thing of another person? What exactly were the rights of the dying? Were they really so boundless? Would he have asked this of a son? In her experience, men were the ones who tended to become sentimental, hobbled by emotion, while women possessed a certain brutal efficiency. That was why the Final Girl lived—the killer routinely underestimated her ruthlessness. Maybe, because he knew his daughter as well as any other person on earth, her father had anticipated her rage. Maybe he was counting on it.

  She said, I’m sorry for waking you.

  She said, How’s Dad?

  In Havana, the festival was in its final days
. At the Third Hotel, Isa was on duty at the front desk, no carnation behind her ear, and in a good mood because some girls from Barcelona had left behind recent issues of Seventeen. Clare noticed that The Two Faces of January had been added to the book collections left out for guests: guidebooks, for the most part, but also mass-market paperbacks, a volume on ancient Rome, a book of poems.

  I finished that novel, Isa said. All the people were awful. And there was no detective.

  The worst, Clare agreed, as though she knew.

  After several inquiries, Clare learned the lone ostrich remained on the loose and that the sightings had continued to abound. The ostrich had been spotted by the Russian embassy. There had even been one report that the ostrich had somehow managed to cross the port of Havana and turn up in Regla.

  The flights to New York were booked for the next seventy-two hours. She would see the festival through to the end.

  She attended the closing gala at Cine Charlie Chaplin, where the festival director, a heavy man in black glasses and a chocolate suit, made brief remarks about how film was a medium that existed outside the constraints of time—it could see into the future, and it could preserve the past. A Coral Prize was presented to a movie about the early days of the revolution, with a fawning depiction of a young Castro. Revolución Zombi, meanwhile, claimed the Audience Prize. From a seat in the back of the theater, Clare watched Yuniel Mata take the stage with his producers; she spotted the director’s skirtsuited assistant in the shadows, hovering near the wings. The men embraced, turned to the audience and waved. Next they were bound for festivals in Canada and Spain and France. The gala ended with the screening of a documentary about the formation of the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV, with the preservation of the past.

  At the festival hotel, she could see the strain all the festivalgoers had caused. The kitchen was reportedly out of bread, the bar out of ice. In order to have enough pesos to get to the airport, Clare avoided the drink menu. On her way to the bathroom, she could have sworn she saw Agata Alonso again, in that same black wig—darting around a corner and down a hallway, haloed for an instant in light.

  Outside Clare spotted Arlo smoking a cigarette on the edge of the circular driveway, his back to the sloped walkway that led down to the tunnels, in a T-shirt printed with the festival logo, the laminated badge still beating softly against his chest. People poured from the hotel entrance, toward the vintage cars idling on the curb, toward the fleet of yellow taxis waiting out in the streets, dispersing into the night. She wondered how Arlo felt, now that the festival had ended. She was about to walk over and ask him when he flicked his cigarette into a bush and slipped down the walkway, moving with the swift stealth of a person with a secret.

  Lights from the hotel illuminated the path; lights embedded in the plants cast a midnight sheen on the leaves. She watched Arlo take his cell phone from his pocket and train the camera lens on the lights; she watched the rise and fall of his slender arm.

  Halfway down the path he stopped and turned the camera on himself. Clare hovered in the shadow of a palm tree. In the distance, she could make out the dark mass of the tunnel gate. Was he taking photos? Filming?

  She stepped back into the bushes, rustling the branches, and Arlo’s eyes snapped up from his phone.

  Hey, she said, trying to sound casual and not like a creep.

  He took a step closer. He told her to stay where she was and spun the phone around, trapping her in the lens.

  Say something, he said.

  There was no trace of familiarity in his voice. Her shorn hair and the night had turned her back into a stranger.

  I chased a ghost into the mountains, she could have said. I made the ghost and then I drowned him or maybe he was a real man after all, a stranger I let into my bed and then frightened away. It was hard to say what exactly had happened.

  Or, It’s Clare. Clare with a shitty haircut.

  Or, Here we are in the present tense.

  She cleared her throat. She touched her skull.

  I’m leaving tomorrow, she told him.

  You and everyone else.

  Arlo pocketed his phone and walked briskly up the path, straight past her. From the top of the walkway she watched him join a small group of people with festival T-shirts. He bummed a cigarette; he tipped his head back and exhaled into the sky, laughing and loose, like he had been among them all along.

  On the street a woman on a skateboard shot out of the shadows, sliding to a stop at the mouth of the circular driveway. A taxi driver whistled. Arlo’s sister carried a black backpack on each shoulder, her fingers hooked under the straps. She called his name. Arlo put out his cigarette and walked down the sloped driveway, turning once to wave at the group he was leaving behind. When he reached his sister, she gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and handed him one of the backpacks. He took off his festival badge and hung it around her neck. She stepped off the skateboard and tucked it under her arm. They crossed the road and went down an unlit street, backpacks heavy on their shoulders, looking almost as though they were leaving for a trip.

  * * *

  The next day Clare checked out of the Third Hotel for good, and at the airport, from a hard orange chair in the departures terminal, she looked up and glimpsed Agata Alonso in the Plexiglas-walled VIP lounge, one level above the gate area. She wondered if the actress was flying back to Spain, or leaving for some other destination. She was drinking a beer, an arm draped across her stomach, and staring straight ahead. At a TV screen, perhaps. Hello, Clare imagined saying to her, in her very best Spanish. I am a great admirer of what you are doing.

  A woman sat down next to Clare. She wore a plaid dress and leather sandals, her dark hair tied back in a French braid. She asked Clare if she was traveling alone.

  Yes, Clare said. You?

  The woman nodded. She was in the hotel business and had been in Havana for a week, to inspect a new property. She was from Argentina but lived in Italy now. She had noticed many women traveling alone in Havana, but they were all very young. University students, she assumed.

  But you are not a university student. She pointed a manicured finger at Clare.

  That’s for sure, Clare replied.

  The woman sighed and said that she dreamed of lying very still on a beach and feeling her mind empty, one thought at a time. Given her line of work, she was unable to enter a hotel without scrutinizing every detail.

  The stiller I get the more thoughts I have, Clare did not say.

  I know what you mean, she said instead. I’m the same way about elevators.

  Work or pleasure? the woman asked, stretching her arms over her head. She stared at Clare for a moment then snapped her fingers.

  I’m going with pleasure, she said. I can tell you’ve spent a lot of time in the sun. Whereas I spent so much time indoors I thought I would turn into a vampire.

  The woman’s flight was called. When Clare looked back up at the VIP lounge, Agata Alonso was gone.

  As they flew away from Havana, turbulence batted the plane around and Clare sank deep in her seat and remembered the quake of the train as it peeled away from the steel path. The world had gone completely silent for an instant, and then that silence was split like a knife through a melon. In New York she would search the Web for more information about the derailment and on a blog she would come across a video recorded on a cell phone, twenty-three seconds of footage. She would watch the lens pass over the slain steel body of the train, the passengers waiting in the grass. She would have to watch five times before she glimpsed two men arguing, heard the child wailing in the background, saw a different child doing a handstand, saw three women standing with their arms around each other, saw a lone woman sitting on the ground, face to her knees. For an instant, Clare would mistake this person for herself.

  At her laptop, she would think back to Revolución Zombi, the hero’s plan to record the zombie apocalypse and put it up for sale, about all the curious worlds that would have been exposed in the background, all
the unseen corners pulled into the light. When a person did not know they were being watched, what they would do when they believed themselves to be in a state of true privacy—that was the lure of found footage, that clarification of human mystery, and that was why surveillance was so lethal: a true erosion of privacy inevitably led to an erosion of self.

  In the footage of the crash, Clare would be invisible, hard to believe she had been there at all.

  * * *

  That would not be the only video Clare would uncover online.

  The second would last six minutes, and from the volume of comments and shares, it seemed to be finding quite the audience. The footage would show Agata Alonso kneeling on a concrete floor in some kind of warehouse, in cutoff shorts and a tight white T-shirt and black boots, the treaded soles clumped with mud. The round faces of lights on stands and cameras on tripods peered down like spectators; she was surrounded. A man in khaki shorts and a rumpled linen shirt was standing over her, holding out a blue plastic bucket and bellowing at her to drink. The actress was slumped over, her neck bent. She shook her head again and again. She cried out, shoved the bucket away; a small wave of red rose over the plastic edge and sloshed down on the floor, bloodying her shorts. No one was coming to help her.

  In the next shot, this producer stood in the lobby of the festival hotel. People were crowding around him, glasses raised. They were offering congratulations; it was the night Revolución Zombi had won the Audience Prize. Grazie, grazie, the producer kept saying, raising the trophy over his head.

  Next the producer trailed Yuniel Mata’s skirtsuited assistant down a marble hallway, a hand planted on her ass.

  At the end, Agata Alonso had placed a single credit: her name under DIRECTED BY.

  On the flight to Miami, something in the atmosphere of Clare shifted. She did not board her connection to New York. Instead she rented a car and drove north, past Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale and Jupiter. She accelerated toward the source. By Daytona a fat pink moon had started to reveal itself in the sky. It was a troubled moon, she decided. It looked like a looming grievance; it looked lit from within.