The Way Inn Read Online Free Page B

stepping away from the sink to look at the painting over the desk, the only example of the hotel’s factory-made art in my room. The paintings in the bar had seemed so threatening last night—remembering the moment, the threat had come not from what lay within their frames but from the possibility of what lay outside them.
    You have to look at the bigger picture, she said—and she meant it literally. If the paintings were simply scraps of a single giant canvas, they could be reassembled. And if they were reassembled, what picture formed? We were being fed, morsel by morsel, a grand design. “A representation of spatial relationships” was how she described it. Her work, she said, involved sensing patterns in space—finding sites that were special confluences of abstract qualities, where the curving lines of a variety of economic, geographic and demographic variables converged. A kind of modern geomancy, a matter of instinct as much as calculation. She had a particular gift for seeing these patterns, any patterns. And the paintings formed a pattern. She was certain.
    After midnight and after whisky, the idea found some traction with me. But in the morning, with the lights on, it sounded absurd. The artwork before me was simply banal, and I could not see that multiplying it would do anything but compound its banality. A chocolate-colored mass filled the lower part of the frame, with an echoing, paler—let’s say latte—band around it or behind it, and a smaller, mocha arc to the upper left. Assigning astral significance to such a mundane composition was, frankly, more than simply eccentric, it was deranged. She had spent too long looking for auspicious sites and meaningful intersections for hotels, and was applying her divination to areas where it did not apply. I tried to trace the lines of the painting beyond the frame, to imagine where they might go next, extrapolating from what I could see. Spheres. Conjoined spheres. Nothing more. Spatial relationships—what did that even mean?
    Spit, rinse. Bag, credentials, keycard. The shadows returned and I closed the door on them.
    Music while waiting for the lift: easy-listening “Brown Sugar.” The lift doors were flanked by narrow full-length mirrors. Vanity mirrors, installed so people spend absent minutes checking their hair and don’t become impatient before the lift arrives. Mirrors designed to eat up time—there was some dark artistry, it’s true, but a decorators’ trick, not a cabalistic conspiracy. A small sofa sat in the corridor near the lift, one of those baffling gestures toward domesticity made by hotels. It was not there to be sat in—it was there to make the corridor appear furnished, an insurance policy against bleakness and emptiness.
    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?
    â€œWho stays in hotels?” I asked my father.
    â€œBusinessmen,” my father said. “And travellers. Holidaymakers. People on honeymoon.” He smiled at my mother, a complex smile broadcasting on