by Will Wiles
Exactly like that.
The long, low building filled the horizon. It was the horizon. Four storeys, off-white cladding panels, a grid of tinted windows. The red lights were on the roof of this groundscraper. They were not for navigation or for warning aircraft, they were letters.
WAY INN.
Another hotel? No. The same hotel.
I was still inside the hotel.
At once, it was obvious. What I had imagined to be the outdoors was nothing more than an immense courtyard, surrounded on all sides by Way Inn. My escape had been an illusion, a mere stroll in one of the hotel’s interminable inner lacunae.
I sat on the rock and stared at the looming cliff face of the hotel, hollowed out by this discovery. Maybe there was nothing more than this—everything I knew, every place I had been, was no more than a tolerated aberration in the uniform, porous structure of Way Inn. The entirety of reality revealed as nothing more than a mote floating in a hotel courtyard. There was no way out, only ways deeper in.
A single fire door punctuated the windowless ground floor of the hotel, and it had been left ajar. An invitation, a taunt. Come back inside. Where else is there to go?
Inside the door, however, all was not quite as I expected. I was not in one of the typical ground-floor spaces, but instead a long, bare corridor with white-painted breezeblock walls and a poured concrete floor that made loud echoes of my footsteps. This sparse avenue was lit by plain fluorescent strips which buzzed and blinked, turning piecemeal sections of the path ahead momentarily dark, as if the corridor was holding itself in the realm of the real only by force of a titanic, unseen act of will. There were no doors to try, just occasional abstract paintings, and I heard the fire door slam closed behind me. For the second time, I rued not leaving a door propped open, but I doubted I could have made any lasting difference to the behavior of an aperture the hotel wanted closed. It decided where I could go and I would be deluded if I thought otherwise. My desire to escape was purely ornamental now—what propelled me forward was a grim form of curiosity, a bleak interest in what Way Inn had arranged for me.
The corridor terminated in an anonymous black door with no number on it. I tried the handle and it opened easily. On the other side was more corridor—but again, there was a variation on the familiar pattern. This portion of the hotel was only dimly lit and the impeccable minimal décor of a global chain was gone, replaced with kitschy 1950s Americana. The carpet was night blue and woven with a design of stylized yellow stars. The pattern was repeated on the wallpaper, but inverted—tiny blue pinprick stars on a yellow background. The exact color scheme was hard to make out as the only light had a reddish tinge, and was cast from a source farther down the corridor. And while the hotel had previously showed the same flawless standard of maintenance wherever I went, here it had let its standards slip. The carpet was worn through to its burlap structure in patches and the wall-paper was loosening and stained. Only the paintings looked as they did elsewhere—and I was struck by the atemporality of their design, the way they fitted into this retro environment as well as they had everywhere else.
Where had I come from to get here? I looked and saw without much surprise that the door I had used was numbered 219. In one direction, the corridor advanced into darkness; the other way was toward the arterial red glow. Toward the glow, then.
Many of the rooms I passed were open, and looking in them I saw I had missed the party of the century. Empty miniatures bottles lay thick on the floors and glass Manhattans had been built on the surfaces of the period furniture. Ashtrays overflowed with cold cigar butts and lipstick-stained cigarette ends. The sheets on the beds were twisted and splashed. Furniture was smashed and clothing, male and female, was everywhere, often torn. An airless blow-up doll was draped over one of the televisions, analogue snow showing through the translucent pink plastic of its abdomen. All the rooms had small, ancient televisions, and all were switched to empty channels, casting shivering blue static shadows across these depopulated scenes of debauchery. The air was tainted with stale tobacco smoke, sour sweat and evaporated dregs of liquor; and those odors masked a deeper waft of corruption—decay of bodies, of buildings, of minds.
After twenty or thirty meters the corridor opened up on one side, becoming a gallery or mezzanine overlooking a courtyard. I paused at the iron railing, its yellow paint measled with rust, and looked down on a defunct kidney-shaped swimming pool, its dry bottom choked with rubbish. The sky was a dull bronze and lacked a basic ingredient of sky-ness; I knew it had never been warmed by a sun. What illuminated the courtyard and sent bloody shadows into the corridor was a giant neon sign, standing like a totem pole at the open end of the U of buildings.
WAY
INN
NO
VACANCIES
Three of those words were lit, humming red; the no was unpowered. Vacancies, of course.
I was a moth to this sign. In thrall to a compulsion I could not understand, I descended the staircase at the end of the mezzanine. The sign was a classic from the post-War golden age of the American motor hotel, designed to be seen by travellers in chrome-dazzled shark-finned cars driving along newly built interstate highways. The lettering of WAY INN was elaborate, suggestive of copperplate and California, an early branding scheme that had been abandoned long ago. Before it had been homogenized by corporate identity consultants. This was Way Inn back when it was small, local, quirky, before it became a global behemoth. Why had it preserved this relic of itself, sequestered deep in the inner hotel? Unguessable sentimentality? And why, then, let it get trashed? Was this a hideaway for Hilbert and his kind; one of the silent, secret places he alluded to?
As I walked across the courtyard, I kicked empty miniatures and beer cans into the pool. A couple of inches of coffee-black liquid lingered at the pool’s lowest point, and its diving board was encrusted with brown stains. Among the bottles and cans floating in the filthy residue was a long, blond wig. The white webbing of the poolside recliners sagged on rusting frames. Pornographic magazines from four decades were strewn here and there. Party hats and strings of plastic beads. Syringes. A silent place, yes—apart from the dead sky, what made this mystery motel uncanny was the total hush that surrounded it like a moat; not the contented quiet of the countryside, but an anechoic void of terrifying nullity. All that could be heard, apart from my own shuffling, clattering steps through the litter, was the buzz of the mighty neon sign.
The sign—it was why I was here. It was what I had been brought here to see. And I was not the first. Burned-out candles ringed the metal pillar that supported the neon letters, and inscrutable patterns had been scrawled in chalk and spray paint on the concrete. What a shabby place Hilbert’s utopia turned out to be—a shitty dead end where there was nothing to do but get wasted and screw, a world without limits limited to the low-grade pleasures of a motel. Not a constant cocktail party but an eternal lost weekend, raiding a bottomless minibar and sweating under a sunless dome.
And beyond the motel, nothing. A Martian desert marked by patches of black scrub. No, not scrub: bodies, dark-suited, scattered in the wasteland behind the sign. No water in the pool, nothing on TV, no highway, nowhere to go, and only one really sure way to check out.
A couple of armchairs, removed from the rooms, sat facing the sign. I sat in one and gazed up at the crackling red neon.
“Hello,” I said.
The sign did nothing.
“I’m looking for a sign,” I said. “Are you the sign?”
The sign went dark. But not wholly dark—three of its letters were still lit, the Y of way and the ES at the end of vacancies.
YES
“Am I alive or dead?”
The YES disappeared, leaving the motel forecourt in night, its outlines only barely perceptible against the hellish bronze firmament.
“Yes or no only, huh?”
YES
“Am I dead? Did Hilbert kill me?”
The NO of NO VACANCIES lit up. No, not dead. That wa
s good. It was a start.
“Does Hilbert want to kill me?”
YES
“Is there a way out?”
YES
“So I can get out?”
YES
“Where? How?”
The sign died.
“Yes or no, right. OK.” I tried to reformulate what I wanted to ask. “Will I find the way out?”
NO
“Does Dee know the way out?”
YES
“So if I find Dee, I’ll find the way out?”
YES
“Do you know where Dee is?”
YES
“It’s you, isn’t it? You’re shielding Dee from Hilbert.”
YES
I could just about see it now—at every stage the hotel had directed me toward Dee. And Hilbert’s interventions had driven us apart again. I had assumed that Hilbert was working on instructions set by the hotel—but what if he wasn’t? What if he was the servant who was no longer proving reliable, who could no longer hear the voice of his master, his sanity bending and fracturing under the strain of his long acquaintance with infinity? He had direct contact with his god, and it was destroying him, as it would destroy any man. All at once I was ambushed by an emotion: pity. Not pity for Hilbert, but pity for the hotel, forced to rely on such delicate, breakable creatures as we humans. A race that had been given the powers of a god, and used that power to build a chain of hotels. Maybe other, more inspired species were making towering, epic use of the Way Inn elsewhere, fashioning palaces and libraries, utopias and total artworks. Not us; we built a hotel, and limited our expressions of pride to the make of coffee brewed in the lobby.
Inadequacy took me, a sucking wave drawing the sand out from under my feet. I was in the presence of an oracle, perhaps on the slopes of Olympus itself, able to ask and be answered. And all I could think about was the immediate conundrum facing me, the question of evading Hilbert.
“Do you know the meaning of life?”
NO
Too much to ask. The hotel’s brush-off didn’t mean life was meaningless, merely that it didn’t know the answer. And why should it? I could plumb a lesser mystery. But what was there?
“Can I help you at all, madam?”
“Watch my son, please.”
“Are you a guest at the hotel?”
“My husband is. Watch my son, I’ll be back shortly.”
I am sitting on a black leather armchair that is far too large for me. My feet do not touch the ground. The man who had spoken to my mother, who wore a red waistcoat with shiny silver buttons and white shirtsleeves, leaned down to my level.
“What’s your name?”
“Neil,” I said.
“Would you like some juice, Neil?”
“I would like that.” My mother was nowhere to be seen. The theater with the silver tray and the little disc of layered paper was acted out for me. I could ask for things and they would appear, and they would appear with panache. Although I was alone, I felt safe. After that agonizing train journey through a flame-racked world, I am warm and people are smiling at me and bringing me drinks. This is a hotel, I thought, and I know that I like hotels.
Big ice cubes, the biggest I’ve ever seen. “The Americans like their ice.” Something my father said. It had been cryptic to me when he said it. Americans? We were in England. But here was a glass of big American ice cubes. There was a plastic scepter I could use to move them around.
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.
