The Way Inn Read Online Free Page A

hamming it up, in moments he believed himself unobserved, his expression was one of innocent, neutral dim-wittedness. “She must be the only person in this hotel who isn’t! Good God, what else is there to do out here?”
    â€œShe works for Way Inn.”
    â€œOh, right, chambermaid?” Maurice said, and Phil barked a laugh.
    I smiled tolerantly. “She finds sites for new hotels—so I suppose she’s checking out her handiwork.”
    â€œSo she’s to blame,” Phil said. “Does she always opt for the middle of nowhere?”
    â€œI think the conference center and the airport had a lot to do with it.”
    â€œAha, yes,” Maurice said. Without warning, he lunged under the table and began to root about in his satchel. Then he reemerged, holding a creased magazine folded open to a page marked with a sticky note. The magazine was Summit , Maurice’s employer, and the article was by him, about the MetaCenter. The headline was ANOTHER FINE MESSE .
    â€œI came here while they were building it,” Maurice said. He prodded the picture, an aerial view of the center, a white diamond surrounded by brown earth and the yellow lice of construction vehicles. “Hard-hat tour. It’s huge. Big on the outside, bigger on the inside: 115,000 square meters of enclosed space, 15,000 more than the ExCel Center. Thousands of jobs, and a catalyst for thousands more. Regeneration, you know. Economic development.”
    I heard her voice: enterprise zone, growth corridor, opportunity gateway. That lulling rhythm. I wanted to be back in my room.
    â€œDid you stay here?” Phil asked.
    â€œNah, flew in, flew out,” Maurice said. “This place is brand-new. Opened a week or two ago, for this conference I’m told.”
    â€œSo they say,” I said, just to make conversation, since there appeared to be no escaping it for the time being. To make conversation, to keep the bland social product rolling off the line, word shapes in place of meaning. While Phil again explained the unfinished state of the pedestrian bridge and our tragic reliance on buses, I focused on demolishing my breakfast. Maurice took the news about the buses quite well—an impressive performance of huffing and eye-rolling that did not appear to lead to any lasting grievance. “The thing is,” he said, as if communicating some cosmic truth, “where there’s buses, there’s hanging around .”
    There was no need for me to hang around. My coffee was finished, my debt to civility paid.
    â€œExcuse me,” I said, and left the table.
    Back in my room, housekeeping had not yet called, and the risen sun was doing little to cut through the atmospheric murk beyond the tinted windows. The unmade bed, the inert black slab of the television, the armchair with a shirt draped over it—these shapes seemed little more than sketched in the feeble light. Before dropping my keycard into the little wall-mounted slot, which would activate the lights and the rest of the room’s electronic comforts, I walked over to the window to look out. It wasn’t even possible to tell where the sun was. Shadowless damp sapped the color from the near and obliterated the distant. The thick glass did nothing to help; instead it gave me a frisson of claustrophobia, of being sealed in. I looked at its frame, at all the complicated interlayers and the seals and spacers holding the thick panes in place: high-performance glass, insulating against sound and temperature, allowing the hotel to set its own perfect microclimate in each room.
    A last look as I recrossed the small space—the brightest point in the room was the red digital display of the radio-alarm on the bedside table. I slid the card in the slot and the room came alive. Bulbs in clever recesses and behind earth-toned shades. Stock tickers streamed across the TV screen. In the bathroom, the ascending whirr of a fan. I brushed my teeth,