by Will Wiles
In fact, given that this was a new hotel, it was possible, even likely, that no one had ever sat in it. An urge to be the first gripped me, but the lift arrived. Several people were already in it, blocking my view of infinity.
The first time I saw a hotel lobby, it was empty. Not completely empty, in retrospect: there were three or four other people there, a few suited gentlemen reading newspapers and an elderly couple drinking tea. And the hotel staff, and my father and mother. But my overriding impression was plush emptiness. Tall, leather, wing-back armchairs, deep leather sofas riveted with buttons that turned their surfaces into bulging grids. Lamps like golden columns, ashtrays like geologic formations, a carpet so thick that we moved silently, like ghosts.
Who was this fine place for? Surely not for me, a boy of six or seven—it had been built and furnished for more important and older beings. But where were they? When did they all appear?
“Who stays in hotels?” I asked my father.
“Businessmen,” my father said. “And travellers. Holidaymakers. People on honeymoon.” He smiled at my mother, a complex smile broadcasting on grown-up frequencies I could detect but not yet decode. My mother did not smile back.
A waiter had appeared, without a sound. My father turned back to me, his smile once more plain and genial, eager to please his boy. “What would you like to drink?”
“What is there?”
“Anything you like.”
“Coca Cola?” I said, unable to fully believe that such a cornucopia could exist, that I could order any drink at all and it would be delivered to me.
Mother straightened like a gate clanging shut. “We mustn’t go off our heads with treats. How much will this cost?” The question went to the waiter but her eyes were on me and my father, warning.
“Darling, the company will pay.”
“Will they? Do they know it’s for him? Is that allowed?”
“They won’t know, and if they did, they wouldn’t mind. It’s just expenses.”
Expenses—another word freighted with adult mystery. Expenses, I knew, meant something for nothing, treats without consequences, the realm of my father; a sharp contrast to the world of home, which was all consequences. And expenses meant conflict, but not this time.
My father sold car parts, but he never called them car parts—they were always auto parts. Later, I learned specifics: he worked for a wholesaler and oversaw the supply of parts to distributors. This meant continual travel, touring retailers around the country. He was away from home three out of four nights, and at times for whole weeks. I yearned for the days he was home. We would go to the park, or go swimming—nothing I did not do with my mother, but the experience was transformed. He brought an anarchic air of possibility to the slightest excursion. A gleam in his eye was enough to fill me with mad joy. It was life as it could be lived, not as it was lived.
This was, in my father’s words, “a proper hotel”—plush and slightly stuffy; English, not American; not part of a chain. It was in a seaside resort town, far enough from home for the company to pay for a room, but close enough for me and my mother to join him for a brief holiday, a desperate experiment in combining his peripatetic career with home and child-rearing. A fun and, much more important, normal time would be enjoyed by all—such was my mother’s anxiety on these points that she successfully robbed herself of any enjoyment. The hotel was quiet because it was off-season. Winter coats were needed for walks along the gray beach; the paint was bright on the signs above the metal shutters, though the neon stayed unlit. The town was asleep, and we were intruders. In the hotel, we dined quietly among empty tables, an armory of cutlery glinting unused, table linen like snow undisturbed by footsteps. I roamed the corridors. The ballroom was deserted and smelled of floor polish. The banqueting hall was a forest of upturned chairs on tables. Everything was waiting for others to arrive, but who, and when? What happened here was of great importance and considerable splendor, but it happened at other times, and to unknown persons. Not to me.
Maybe my father moved in that world, where things were actually happening. There was a provisional air to him, as if he was conserving himself for other purposes. Even when he was physically present, he conducted himself in absences. He smoked in the garden and made and received telephone calls, speaking low. I would listen, taking care that he did not see me, trying to learn about the other world from what he said when he thought no one was listening. But he spoke in code: magneto, camshaft, exhaust manifold, powertrain, clutch. And rarer, another code: yes, special, away, not until, weekend, she, her, she, she.
I was missing something.
The other lift passengers and I debarked into a lobby that had filled with people: sitting on the couches, standing in groups, talking on or poking at phones. Normally these communal places—the lobbies, the foyers, the atria—are barely used, inhabited only fleetingly by people on their way elsewhere, checking in or out, perhaps alone on a sofa waiting for someone or something. To see the space at capacity, teeming with people, was curiously thrilling, like observing by chance a great natural migration. This was it: I was present for the main event, when the hotels were at capacity and the business centers hosted back-to-back videoconferences with head offices all over the planet. I could see it all for what it was and what it wasn’t. Because even when thronged with people, the lobby is still uninhabited—it cannot really be occupied, this space, or made home; it is a channel people sluice through. Those people sitting on the sofas don’t make the furniture any more authentic than the maybe-virgin seat I had seen by the lift. The space isn’t for anyone. My younger self might have been troubled by this thought, that even the main event could not give the space purpose—but now I had come to realize that the sensation was simple existential paranoia. I recognized the limits of authenticity.
Where there are buses, there is hanging around; Maurice’s dictum was quite correct. The driveway outside the hotel was protected by a porte-cochere. Under this showy glass and steel canopy, three coaches idled while conference staff in high-visibility tabards pointed and bickered, and desultory clusters of dark-suited guests smoked and hunched against blasts of cold, wet wind. The buses were huge and shiny, gaudy in banana-skin livery; their doors were closed. Evidently a disagreement or communications breakdown was under way—the attendants listened with fraught attention to burbling walkie-talkies, staring at nothing, or shouted at and directed one another, or jogged about, or consulted clipboards, but nothing happened as a result of this pseudoactivity.
I was about to retreat behind the glass doors, back to the warmth and comfort of the lobby, when I spotted Rosa (or Rhoda) standing alone among the huddle waiting for the buses, cigarette in one hand, phone apparently fused to the other. She had put on a brightly colored quilted jacket and seemed unbothered by the cold and the icy raindrops that the wind pushed under the shelter.
“Hey,” I said.
Rosa looked at me without obvious emotion, although her neutrality could be read as wariness. “Hey.”
“What’s going on?” I said, nodding in the direction of the buses, where frenzied stasis continued. She looked momentarily dejected, and shrugged. We would never know, of course. The cause of this sort of holdup was rarely made clear, it was just more nontime, nonlife, the texture of business travel. Hotel lobbies and airport lounges are built to contain these useless minutes and soothe them away with comfortable seats, agreeable lighting, soft music, mirrors and pot plants.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get much of an opportunity to talk back there,” I said. Rosa’s edge of frostiness toward me, her shrugs and monosyllables, bothered me. I was certain we had got on well in the past, and she seemed an excellent candidate for some conference sex, if we could get past this froideur. My failure to capitalize on the coincidence in the bar last night had left a sour aftertaste. Some sex would dispel that; it would divert me, at least. If Rosa reciprocated.
“You seemed busy,” she said.
“Nothing important.”
/> “Who was that man who joined us?”
“Maurice? I thought you knew him. A reporter, for a trade magazine.”
“I’ve seen him around.”
“He’s hard to miss.”
“A friend of yours?”
“Not really.”
“So this girl he mentioned . . .”
Sexual jealousy, was it? That was a promising sign.
“You shouldn’t believe a word Maurice says,” I said. “He was only trying to stir up trouble. I was having a drink with an acquaintance. You know how you keep running into the same people at these things. Which can be a very good thing.”
“Yeah.” I was rewarded with a shy smile. Pneumatics hissed—one of the buses was opening its doors at last.
I decided not to overplay my hand—there would be other opportunities. “Really good to see you again,” I said. “Let’s talk later.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’d like that.” Her mobile phone, briefly removed from the social mix, reappeared like a fluttering fan.
Boarding the bus, I felt heartened by the encounter. It wouldn’t be too difficult after all.
The bus filled quickly, but there was a further mysterious delay before it got moving. Still, it was warm and dry, and the throbbing engine was as soothing as the ocean. The air had a chemical bouquet—new, everything was new. I stared at the patterned moquette covering the seat in front of me. Blue-and-gray squares against another gray. Hidden messages, secret maps? No, just a computer-generated tessellation reiterating to infinity. People milling around outside. New tarmac. A woman sat in the seat next to mine; I appraised her with a half-glance and found little that interested me. She ignored me and thumbed her phone, her only resemblance to Rosa.
Movement. One of the organizers appeared at the front of the bus, craning her neck as if looking for someone among the passengers. The bus doors closed with a sigh; the organizer sat down. The engine changed its pitch and we moved off.
We drove along an access road parallel to the motorway. The motorway itself was hidden from view by a low ridge engineered to deaden the howl of the high-speed traffic. The beneficiaries of this landscaping were a row of chain hotels: the Way Inn behind us, ahead a Novotel, a Park Plaza and a Radisson Blu, all in the later stages of construction, surrounded by hoardings promising completion by the end of the year. Here was the delayed skywalk: an elegant glass-and-steel tube describing most of an arch over the access road, the ridge and the unseen motorway, but missing a central section, the exposed ends sutured with hazard-colored plastic. On the Way Inn side of the road, the skywalk joined the beginnings of an enclosed pedestrian link between the hotels at the first-floor level. Eventually guests would be able to stroll to the MetaCenter in comfort, protected from the climate and the traffic, but only the Way Inn section was finished. Perhaps all this construction work was evidence of industry, investment, applied effort—but the scene was, as far as I could see, deserted. There were no other vehicles on the road.
Signs warned of an approaching junction and myriad available destinations. The bus circled the intersection, giving us a glimpse down on-ramps of the motorway beneath us, articulated lorries thundering through six lanes of filthy mist, and then of the old road, a petrol station’s bright obelisk, sheds, used cars. We didn’t take either of those routes. Instead the bus turned onto another access road, again parallel to the motorway, but on the opposite side. A vast object coalesced in the drizzle: eight immense white masts in two ranks of four suggesting the boundary of an area the size of a small town, high-tension steel crosshatching the air above. The MetaCenter. My first instinct was to laugh. For all its prodigious size and expense, and the giddying alignment of business and political interests it represented, there was something very basic about it. It was, in essence, a giant rectangular tent, with guy ropes strung from the masts supporting its roof, keeping the rain off the fair inside. Plus roads and parking. So there it was, the ace card for the economic planning of this whole region: a very big dry place that’s easy to get to. And easy to see—the white masts, as well as holding up the immense space-frame roof, were a landmark to be noticed at speed from the motorway; while from a circling plane, the white slab would glare among the dull gray and brown of its hinterland.
The bus was off the access road now, onto the MetaCenter’s own road network: bright yellow signs pointed to freight loading, exhibitors’ entrances, bus and coach drop-off. Flower beds planted with immature shrubs were wrapped in shiny black plastic, a fetishist’s garden. There, again, was the ascending loop and expressive steel and glass of the unfinished pedestrian bridge. A handshake the size of a basketball court dominated the white membrane of the façade, overwritten with the words WELCOME MEETEX: TOMORROW’S CONVENTIONS TODAY. This was accompanied by multistorey exhortations from a telepresence software company: JOIN EVERYONE EVERYWHERE.
A zigzag curb, coaches nosing up to it diagonally. We dropped out of the front door one by one in the stunned way common to bus passengers, however long their journey. But we recovered quickly—no one lingered in the half-rain—and we scurried toward the endless glass doors of the MetaCenter, past an inflatable credit card that shuddered and jerked against the ropes securing it to the concrete forecourt.
Hot air blasted me from above, a welcoming blessing from the center’s environmental controls. Thinking about my hair, I ran a hand through it, a wholly involuntary action. Gray carpet flecked with yellow. Behind me, someone said, “Next year we’re going to Tenerife, but I don’t want it to be just a box-ticking exercise.” Queues navigated ribboned routes to registration and information desks. Memory-jogged, I fished my credentials out of my jacket pocket and slipped the vile lanyard over my head. Door staff approved me with a flicker of their eyes.
A broad ramp poured people down into the main hall of the MetaCenter. Gravity-assisted, like components on a production line or animals in a slaughterhouse, we descended, enormous numbers of us—a whole landscape shaped to cope with insect quantities of people. Hundreds of miles of vile yellow lanyard had been woven, stitched with METACENTER METACENTER METACENTER thousands of times to be draped around thousands of necks now prickling in the bright light and outside-inside air of the hall. Ahead of us, and already around us, were the exhibitors, in their hundreds, waiting for all those eyes and credentials and job titles to sluice past them. There is the expectant first-day sense that business must be transacted, contacts must be forged, advantages must be gleaned, trends must be identified, value must be added, the whole enterprise must be made worthwhile. Everyone is at the point where investment has ceased and the benefits must accrue. A shared hunger, now within reach of the means of fulfillment. Like religion, but better; provable, practical, purposeful, profitable.
At another fair, in other company, these thoughts might have been mine alone. Not here. All those thousands of conferences, expos and trade fairs around the world, of which I have attended scores if not hundreds—their squadrons of organizers comprise, naturally enough, an industry in itself. And also naturally enough, this industry revels in get-togethers. It wants, it truly needs, its own conferences, meetings, summits and expos. Its people spend their lives selling face-to-face, handshake, eye contact, touch and feel, up close and personal, in the flesh, meet and greet. They believe their own pitch—of course they do. They actually think they are telling the truth, rather than just hawking a product. (Our pitch is very different.)
A conference of conference organizers. A meeting of the meetings industry. And they all knew the recursive nature of their gathering here—they all joked about it, essentially telling the same joke over and over, draining it of meaning until it is nothing more than a ritualized husk, but they laugh all the same. Just a conference of conference organizers, one among many—Meetex joins EIBTM, IMEX, ICOMEX, EMIF and Confex on the calendar, and all of those will include the same jokes and the same small talk, redundancy piled on redundancy, spread out across the globe. This repetition proliferating year after year was enough to
bring on a headache. And indeed a headache had stirred since I left the hotel, accelerated perhaps by the stuffy bus and its throbbing engine, its boomerang route, the swinging 360-degree turn it had made around the motorway junction.
Hosting Meetex was a smart move by the MetaCenter—this space, which could swallow aircraft hangars whole, was in a way the biggest stall at the fair, advertising its services to the people who, captivated by its quality as a venue, would fill it with gatherings of other industries in the coming years. The airport! The motorway! The convenience! The state-of-the-art facilities! The thousands of enclosed square meters! A space without architecture, without nature, where everything outside is held at bay and there is no inside—no edges, the breezeblock walls too distant to see, a blankness above the steel frame supporting scores of lights. But inside this hall was a space with too much design. The fair, the exhibitors, all exhibiting. It was an assault on the eyes, a chaos of detail, several hundred simultaneous demands on your attention. And it was active, it came to you with bleached teeth and a tight T-shirt. Many stands were attended by attractive young women, brightly dressed and full of vim; there must be an inoffensive technical term for them, perhaps along the lines of “brand image enhancement agents,” but they are mostly referred to as booth babes. They jump out at you, try to coax you to try a game or join a list, or they hand you a flier or a low-value freebie like a USB stick or a tote bag.
Combined, these multitudinous pleas—each an invitation to enter a different corporate mental universe and devote yourself to it; invitations that are the product of enormous investments of time and money and creativity—formed a barrage of imagery and information and signs and symbols that at first challenged the brain’s ability to process its surroundings, becoming an undifferentiated blaze of visual abundance, overwhelming our monkey apparatus like lens flare. Which was precisely the point—it was in the interest of the organizers and the host to dazzle you, to leave the impression that there’s not just enough on show, there’s more than enough, far more than enough, a stupefying level of surplus. For a fair to imply that it might have limits is anathema—that’s why they rain down the stats and the superlatives, the square meters and the daily footfall, the record numbers of this and that. What other industry stressed that its product was near-impossible to consume? No wonder my services were needed. Adam was a genius.
