The Fat Innkeeper

by Alan Russell

  Her name wasn’t Eurydice. She had lived, died, and now lived again as Angela Holliday. There was an ethereal quality to her, perhaps because of her fair complexion, perhaps because the lighting didn’t give her a shadow so much as a nimbus.

  “After almost dying,” she said, “many of us were told that our being alive was a miracle. But I say that miracles are merely a point of view. On any given day, we experience thousands of miracles, but we rarely acknowledge them. Our vision has become jaded. We don’t pause to exult in creation, and we run from introspection. We have forgotten what life is, and we are afraid to speak of death.

  “In fact,” she stage-whispered, “when we talk about death we are supposed to whisper, or better yet, not even talk about it. But that is not why we have gathered here. We have come to talk of death. For those who have been where I have, you will understand when I say that I embrace death, for it gave me new life. I embrace death, for it embraced me, and showed me immortality.”

  She walked across the stage, stood directly above Am and Marisa. Her closeness gave off a heat. Am wasn’t sure whether it was all the lights, or just her light. “We are used to viewing death from a distance. Maybe you were like me. You had this tremendous experience, and you wanted to talk about it, but no one wanted to hear. ‘Get on with your life,’ your family and friends said, as if by saying those words they could put this thing behind you.

  “But I didn’t want to forget. I wanted to remember, and explore what had occurred. I took a journey and I came back changed. Life and death are not the same to me anymore.

  “I am the speaker for the dead. I tell my story, and I tell yours.”

  The greatest applause is total silence. Angela Holliday had that applause. She bowed, deeply, and then she left the stage. She was gone for half a minute before the clapping started. It was the kind of ovation that built over the minutes, but Lady Death didn’t return for a curtain call.

  “Let’s go,” said Marisa.

  She awoke Am from his reverie and motioned for him to come along. He decided she was the kind of person who never stayed for the last few innings of a baseball game, who skipped out during the seventh-inning stretch. The idea of a stretch suddenly appealed to him. Am rolled his neck a few times, tried to work out the kinks caused by having to stare upward at Angela. The speaker had, he admitted to himself, transfixed him.

  “We’re going to be late,” said Marisa.

  “For what?”

  “My interview. Heaven can wait, but from what I’ve heard, Angela Holliday can’t.”

  “You’re interviewing Angela Holliday?”

  His excited tone annoyed her, even if she wasn’t sure why. “If you can call ten minutes an interview. That’s all I could wangle out of her manager. After Lady Death boots us out, I figure we can get right to work on the Kingsbury stuff.”

  “Imagine that,” said Am, “we’re going to get our own mini-tour of the Pearly Gates.”

  “This isn’t Saint Peter we’re talking about,” said Marisa. “And the only tour we’ll be getting is a few parceled seconds of her national book tour. It’s been dubbed the Eulogy Tour. Some eulogy. Word is they gave her a half million dollar advance for her book.”

  “What’s the name of her book?”

  “Speaker for the Dead. Love those cheery titles.”

  By earthly standards, the Crown Jewel Suite was about as close to heaven as most mortals ever get. The room had housed seven presidents, two emperors, four queens, three kings, a bevy of lesser royalty, and enough Hollywood stars to fill up a minor constellation or two. It rented for three thousand dollars a night. A curator didn’t come with the room, but should have.

  The Crown Jewel Suite had long been the showpiece of the Hotel’s interior designers, each trying to outdo the last. Most hotel managers remind designers that function should be just as important as aesthetics, a lecture usually listened to carefully, then invariably ignored. In the case of the Crown Jewel Suite, function ranked right behind whether to offer waxed or plain dental floss (it was decided that both should be in the amenity pack). The room was made up of one-of-a-kind pieces. One enthusiastic designer had said after decorating the largest of its three bathrooms, “I see not the loo, but the Louvre.” For what it was worth, his toilet did make it into a number of tabletop magazines.

  Mr. Hubert, a rather flamboyant gay man, had been the Hotel’s primary interior designer for the past dozen years. He was a truly gifted artist, but he did have his quirky side. One of his claims to fame was that for a time he had managed to put a color motif to all seven of the Hotel floors. “The guest,” he had insisted, “can have the color he wants.” During the short-lived “lollipop era” (thirteen months), there were only a dozen documented requests for a floor on the basis of color. Mr. Hubert had also tried to have the Hotel carpets changed four times a year. “They should reflect the seasons,” he had lectured to the owners. When reminded that San Diego doesn’t really have seasons, Mr. Hubert supposedly replied, “It is our duty to remember that the rest of the world does.”

  One of Mr. Hubert’s favorite laments was “I am handcuffed by the museum mentality of this place.” By that he meant the historical status of the Hotel prohibited him from tinkering with it very much. He derided all the “sacred-cow rooms,” areas that had been the same for so long that their longevity alone dictated they could not be touched. Because guest rooms weren’t sacrosanct, Mr. Hubert worked on them with abandon. His latest motif was “the five-senses appeal.” Engineering, which had the onus of fixing anything wrong with the guest rooms, called Mr. Hubert’s designs the “no-sense appeal.”

  Marisa knocked on the entry door to the Crown Jewel Suite. Am expected an attendant would do the answering, a man with small eyes and big shoulders, but it was Angela Holliday who opened her own door. She had changed clothes, was wearing jeans, a peach button-down cotton shirt, and sandals. She didn’t need white wings, Am decided.

  Introductions were made (Am found himself identified as “with the Hotel”), and Angela led them into the suite. She casually motioned to the wet bar and said, “Help yourself to anything you want.” There was a lot they could have helped themselves to, including the requisite fruit basket, chocolates, cheese and crackers, and a fully stocked bar, but they politely declined and waited for her to sit down.

  Angela chose the white leather sofa (“the next white sofa that goes in this Hotel,” executive housekeeper Barbara Terry had been heard to say, “will be made of Mr. Hubert’s hide”), was easily able to position her feet under her backside in that contortion which some women describe as being comfortable. From her shirt pocket she pulled out a tiny hourglass. Or maybe it was a ten-minute glass. She placed it down on the coffee table that separated her from her interviewers, the kind of coffee table that shouldn’t be adorned by magazines (a bleached mahogany with beveled glass and inlaid turquoise). The hourglass granules began to fall.

  “I’m sorry to have so little time to spare,” she said, “but I think you’ll find that most of your questions can be answered by reading my book.”

  She pointed to a stack of books on the coffee table. “Please. One for each of you. They’re autographed.”

  Marisa didn’t seem inclined to reach for a book, so Am took two and said thank you for both of them. The cover was mostly black, save for an ethereal, if apparently female, orator. Behind this speaker were dark, spectral masses, distinguished through the glow of their eyes. Marisa opted to open her notepad instead of the book. Her questions started without preamble, and were answered in the same manner. Am thought the Q and A was like watching a professional tennis match, his head moving back and forth while following the hurried interview format. Marisa covered the background first, took down the shortened life (death?) and times of Angela Holliday, then tried to ask a few questions that went beyond a PR profile.

  “Do you like being called the Angel of Death?” she asked.

  “I don’t appreciate the sensationalistic aspects of the name,”
she said, “but it’s a nickname I can live with.”

  Am laughed, and received an answering smile. Marisa either didn’t think her response funny, or was too hard-pressed for time to chuckle.

  “I heard your talk…”

  “… it was wonderful,” said Am.

  “… today. You mentioned how your near-death experience taught you many things. What was the most important thing it taught you?”

  Angela directed her answer to Am. “To not be afraid of death,” she said. “It is hard to imagine how liberating that notion is. Knowing that there is life after death gave me a freedom I never had before.”

  “I noticed in your speech you never referred to the afterlife as ‘heaven.’“

  “I didn’t call it ‘hell’ either. Death brings us to another plane. It sounds like a cliché, but that place is a far, far better place than the one we now occupy.”

  “That sounds like an endorsement for death.”

  “It’s an endorsement for life, for how we should occupy this time, but don’t. I was able to see what is truly important, and what isn’t.”

  “What is important?”

  “Love. Not romantic love per se, not that I knock such…”

  Another smile for Am.

  “… but more of the philosophy of love as a guiding light. That’s what we are on this planet for. Everything else, seen from a distance, is trivial. We make living complicated, but it should be simple.”

  “One of the criticisms of the near-death movement is that it is too simplistic,” said Marisa. “Critics say it is just another version of the great carrot at the end of the stick, the reward in the next world.”

  “Critics and cynics will be with us always.”

  “Some of those so-called critics and cynics have gone so far as to say the near-death philosophy is an endorsement to suicide. They claim it makes death attractive.”

  Angela shook her head. Vigorously. “That’s nonsense. Many of the survivors of near-death experiences were specifically told it was not their time, that they had to go back, even when they didn’t want to. Death is not a pie in the sky. It is not something to which we can dictate terms.”

  “The late Dr. Kingsbury said that he wouldn’t be surprised if the near-death experience couldn’t be accounted for by chemicals given off by the body during extreme trauma. He was also of the opinion that the near-death experience is now a self-fulfilling prophecy, that those on the threshold of death have certain expectations about what will occur because of what he termed the ‘propaganda’ of your movement.”

  “But in the end,” said Angela, “Dr. Kingsbury became our Paul vis-à-vis his Saul of Tarsus conversion. He saw the light. Dying, he said, ‘Be positive.’ His last words succinctly sum up our movement. I regret that he didn’t live, so as to tell all of us his experiences. I think it not inaccurate, though, to state that his was a deathbed conversion.”

  “Do you think…”

  “I’m sorry,” interrupted Angela, patting the tiny hourglass with her thin index finger. There were no grains of sand left. “Our time is up.”

  Marisa opened her mouth, but the speaker for the dead repeated the same words, pronounced them this time with a finality that went beyond ending a conversation: “Our time is up.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I wanted to tell her,” said Marisa, “that I had just had a near-hourglass experience. I wanted to turn that damn thing over and say, ‘Look! We can keep talking. It’s a miracle’”

  “You saw how a television crew was already lined up outside,” Am said, feeling the need to defend Angela, “and another was forming behind it.”

  Marisa did a cow imitation, complete with an outstretched neck and long-drawn-out moooo. “That makes me part of a media cattle call. You would think the press wouldn’t buy into that. But over the next day or two Lady Death will be splashed all over the local news. There will be bigger lines at her book signings than at the Saint Vincent de Paul food line.”

  “Psychological needs of the community transcending economic needs,” intoned Am. “Sounds like a good story to me. She’s apparently striking a chord…”

  “She’s not Lazarus.”

  “She’s also not your usual tour guide.”

  “You’re right. What kind of tour guide only gives a ten-minute talk? And from that I’m supposed to fluff a major article.”

  “You could always excerpt from her book.”

  “That would mean reading it, which I am not going to do.”

  “Then how does your story get written?”

  “I’ll quote from her speech. And besides, there’s always the introduction to journalism question of ‘where.’ Her suite was made for hyperbole. It’s not exactly a Kmart showroom, is it?”

  “Not quite,” said Am. “And you only saw the sitting room. Behind doors number two and three were the real prizes.”

  “Tell me.”

  He did, and she started taking notes, scribbling as they walked. Am described the Italian marble-top desks, the Austrian-made Bakalowits chandeliers, the oversized down duvets, the Bugatti furniture, the four-poster honeymoon bed mounted with brocades and silk and English chintz, and the classical statuary and custom art. He also clued her into the “hidden” features of the suite, the custom-made three-inch soundproof doors, the hand-woven two-inch-thick carpeting, the air-conditioning that didn’t give off the usual recycled air but instead provided fresh-chilled, the specially created potpourri placed in secreted caches around the room, the individual thermostat console at bedside, and even the two touch-control fireplaces.

  “Magic Fingers?” asked Marisa.

  “Sorry,” said Am.

  She mugged her disappointment.

  “But there is an in-room spa,” he said, “with twelve jet sprays. And a propensity for eating panty hose.”

  Marisa gave him a quizzical look.

  “Last week engineering had to tear the spa up,” explained Am. “Somehow a pair of panty hose ended up clogging one of the pipes. That, I’m sure, was a story in itself. A major part of this business is overcoming monkey wrenches, nylon and otherwise. Since the suite was promised for the night, a whole crew worked furiously to get it fixed. That’s the problem with a unique accommodation, when another room just won’t do. It’s difficult enough to keep up any hotel room even when you have interchangeable parts, when the beds and bureaus and tables can be switched around between the rooms, and there are replacements waiting in storage. But one-of-a-kind rooms are a different undertaking altogether. They require incredible preventative maintenance. TQM is a religion at all great properties.”

  “TQM?”

  “Total Quality Management,” translated Am. “It used to be QA, which is Quality Assurance, but I think someone figured out that three letters sound more official than two. It all translates to having systems in place which try and ensure guest satisfaction. At the Bristol Hotel in Paris they don’t disinfect the toilet seats, they remove them, scrape them, and revarnish them prior to the arrival of every new guest. And before a guest checks into the Ritz in Paris, at least half a dozen employees verify the room is letter-perfect, with inspections not only by room checkers and management, but electricians, plumbers and painters.

  “A few hotels have even gone so far as to decide that the best the world has to offer isn’t good enough for them. London’s Savoy Hotel decided to manufacture its own beds, reputed to be the most comfortable on the planet. The Savoy considers their investment in beds—a rather sizable one—to be in their own best interests. As any hotel employee can tell you, a guest that has failed to have a good night’s sleep is about as happy as a bear denied hibernation.”

  They entered the main lobby. It always looked familiar to visitors, perhaps because it had been featured in dozens of movies. Hollywood thought the Hotel’s lobby the embodiment of what a grand old lobby should look like, and for once Am agreed with Tinseltown’s taste. The ceiling was high, not the thirty-story atriums so popular these days, but hi
gh enough to house a respectable basketball court. There were murals painted on the ceiling, most created by depression-era artists. Short on funds, the artists hadn’t been short on vision. Faux gold leaf abounded, the fool’s gold designs about the only things in the lobby short on bona fides. The lobby had been built with the integrity of another time, erected long before earthquake standards and building safety regulations were put on the books, but not before artisans knew how to create an enduring edifice.

  The front desk was quiet, a rare occasion. A solitary guest was being helped by T.K. “Check-in hour is officially at three o’clock,” he announced, “but let’s see what I can do for you, Mr. Gordon.”

  Am didn’t like T.K.’s all-too-cheery tone. It was his show-time voice. The aspiring comic was always trying out new material at the front desk. He’d been warned on several occasions that he would be trying out his material at the unemployment office if he went too far, but T.K. was irrepressible.

  “Let me guess, Mr. Gordon,” said T.K., flashing his white teeth in a wide smile. “You want a room with a view.”

  Mr. Gordon smiled back. He was more bald than not, about sixty, had the genial, self-assured countenance of someone who had never been forced to scratch too hard for a living. He was, Am had to admit, the perfect dupe.

  “Yes,” said the guest. “That’s exactly what my wife and I want. A room with a view.”

  T.K. nodded. He reached below the counter, pulled out a book, then slapped it down with a resounding thump. “That’ll be six ninety-five.”

  Mr. Gordon was clearly confused. “What do you mean?”

  “E.M. Forster,” said T.K., raising up the novel for Mr. Gordon to see. “His greatest book. A Room with a View. As I’m sure you know, it’s considered a modern classic.”