The Way Inn

For Hazel and Guy
,

with my love

The house is the same size as the world;
or rather, it is the world
.

“THE HOUSE OF ASTERION”
Jorge Luis Borges

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: The Conference

Part Two: The Hotel

Part Three: The Inner Hotel

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Mind-Bending Advance Praise for
The Way Inn

Praise for
Care of Wooden Floors

Also by Will Wiles

Copyright

About the Publisher

T
he bright red numbers on the radio-alarm clock beside my bed arranged themselves into the unfortunate shape of 6:12. Barely four hours since I went to sleep, I was abruptly awake. I remembered that I had been in the bar, and that I had seen the woman again.

Apart from the red digital display—6:13—the room was dark. And the preceding day was clear: I had seen her again, and I had spoken to her. Over the years I had come to believe that my memory was steadily enhancing this woman. Our first encounter was so out of the ordinary that it took on a completely unreal complexion in retrospect, and I suspected that I might be elaborating on it, on her, to make the whole bizarre incident more exotic. But there she was again, matching perfectly what I had assumed was an idealized vision. Her Amazonian height, and her pale skin and red hair—even in the flesh, there was something about her that didn't quite match up to reality, as if she was too high-definition. Just hours later our reunion had already taken on the qualities of a dream. One that had been interrupted before it was complete. Maurice. Maurice had ruined it.

A return to sleep seemed unlikely and unwise. It was less than an hour until the alarm would go off and I had no intention of oversleeping and being forced to head to the fair without a shower and breakfast.

The hotel room was well heated, the carpet soft and warm under my feet. It was quiet, almost silent, but the air conditioner hummed its low hum, and there was something else in the air—a kind of electromagnetic potential, a distorted echo beyond the audible range. Or nothing, just the membranes of the ear settling after being startled from sleep. Outside it would be cold. I opened the curtains but could see little. The sullen orange glow of the motorway to one side, an occluded sky untouched by dawn, and on the level of the horizon a shivering cluster of red lights that suggested, somehow, an oil refinery. Maybe the airport—radar towers, UHF antennae.

I switched on the room lights. Latte-colored carpet, a cuboid black armchair, a desk with a steel and wicker chair, a flat-screen TV on the wall and of course an insipid abstract painting. It was like every other hotel room I've stayed in: bland, familiar, noncommittal, unaligned to any style or culture. I once read that the color schemes in large chain hotels were selected for how they looked under artificial light, on the understanding that the businesspeople staying in the rooms would mostly be there outside daylight hours. And that principle must also apply to the art on the walls—and again I remembered the woman in the bar, what she had said about the paintings. The indistinct background hum seemed a little louder—it had to be the air-con, or the minibar under the desk. It was a benign sound, almost soothing, a suggestion that I was surrounded by advanced systems dedicated to keeping me comfortable.

Showering took the edge off my tiredness, and allowed me to ignore it. I put on a Way Inn bathrobe and returned to the bedroom, drying my hair with a Way Inn towel. The TV was on, but showed only the hotel screen that had greeted me on my arrival in the room last night.

WELCOME MR. DOUBLE

Above this was the corporate logo, a stylized
W
in the official red. A stock photo of a group of Way Inn staff, or models playing Way Inn staff, smiled up at me. Room service numbers and pay-TV options were listed underneath. Today's special in the restaurant was pan-seared salmon. The weather for today and tomorrow: fog and rain. Temperature scarce degrees above zero. I picked up the remote and found the BBC News.

The sky had lightened, but the view had not improved. The glass in the window was thick, presumably soundproofed against the nearby airport, and it gave the landscape a sea-green tint. Mucoid mist shrouded nearly everything. My room was on the second floor of the hotel. Outside was a strip of car park bounded by a chain-link fence, then an empty plot on which a few stacks of orange traffic barriers and half a dozen white vans were slowly sinking into mud. To the extreme right there was a road flanked by a long artificial ridge of earth scabbed with weeds, over which the streetlights of the motorway could be seen. The lights could also be seen reflected in the water-filled ruts that vehicles had left in the scraped-back land; under the mud everything waited to be made over again, more streetlights, more car parking, more windows to look out of.

Many people, I imagine, would find this a depressing scene. But not me. I love to wake in a hotel room. The anonymity, the fact the room could be anywhere—the features that fill others with gloom fill me with pleasure. I have loved hotels since the first time I set foot in one.

I dressed, half-listening to headlines coming from the TV. It was nothing, everything, all things I knew, had heard before. Events. People crushed against a wall, wailing women somewhere hot, an American ambulance boxy orange and white in that too-bright American style of TV footage, then more familiar video-texture from the UK, flowers zip-tied to a signpost beside a road, tears in camera flashes, an appeal for witnesses. The newsreader looked up from her screen and seemed, for a split second, to be surprised by the sight of cameras. World weather. A list of major cities with numbers beside them, little icons meaning sunshine and storms, a world reduced to a spreadsheet of data points. I flipped open my laptop and it came to life. Heavy black unread emails were heaped in my inbox. Invitations, press releases, mailing lists, flight and hotel bookings. More headlines refreshing in my readers. For a moment I was aware of everything, everything was in reach, and then the WiFi symbol flashed and stuttered. A bubble warned me that my connection was lost, and I snapped my laptop shut. The TV was still on—a palm tree jerked and writhed, thrashing back and forth as debris passed it horizontally and the camera went dead. Unseasonal. The newsreader looked up, saw me, and told me the number of dead. I plucked my keycard from its plastic niche on the wall, killing the room.

Myself, reflected to infinity, bending away into an unseeable gray nothing on a twisted horizon.

The lift came to a smooth halt. My myriad reflections in its mirrored walls stopped looking at one another. The doors opened, revealing the bright lobby and a potbellied man with a moustache, who stared back at me as if astonished that I should be using his lift.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, a social reflex, and stepped out.

Music had been playing in the lift, softly, as if it was not meant to be heard. If it was not meant to be heard, why play it at all? To prevent silence, perhaps, to insulate the traveller from isolation and reflection, just as the opposing mirrors provided an unending army of companions that was best admired alone. But I had heard the music, and had been trying to identify it. The answer had come when the doors opened: “Jumpin' Jack Flash,” instrumental, in a zero-cal, easy-listening style.

Wet polymers hung in the air. The hotel was new, new, new, and the chemicals used to treat the upholstery and carpets perfumed the lobby. Box-fresh surfaces blazed under scores of LED bulbs. The lobby was a long, corridor-like space connecting the main entrance with one of the building's courtyards. These courtyards were made up to look like Japanese Zen meditation gardens, a hollow square of benches enclosing an expanse of raked gravel, a dull little pond and a couple of artfully placed boulders, slate-slippery with rain. I have stayed in twenty or thirty Way Inn hotels and I have never seen anyone use those spaces to meditate. They use them to smoke. But that's hotels, really—everything is designed for someone else. Meditation gardens you don't meditate in, chairs you don't sit in, drawers you don't fill containing Bibles you don't read. And I don't know who's using those shoe-cleaning machines.

Opposite the reception desk a line of trestle tables had been set up in the night, and were now staffed by public-relations blonds. Business-suited people and mild conversation filled the space between the PRs and the hotel staff, checking in, carrying bags in and out, picking up papers, shaking hands. Beyond a glazed wall, the restaurant was busy. A banner over the trestles read YOU CAN REGISTER HERE.

Very well then. I walked over; confident, unrecognized, at home. These moments, the first contact between myself and the target event, I treasure. They do not yet know who I am, what my role or meaning might be. But I know everything about them.

A blond woman smiled at me from the other side of the table, over a laptop computer and a spread of hundreds of identical folders. “Good morning,” I said, holding out a business card. “Neil Double.”

She took the card, studied it momentarily, and tapped at the keyboard of the laptop. Although I couldn't see her screen, I knew exactly what she was looking at—my photograph, the personal details that had been fed into the “*required” boxes of an online form six months ago, little else. “Mr. Double,” she said, English tinged with a Spanish accent, her smile a few calories warmer than before. “Welcome to Meetex.”

A tongue of white card spooled out of the printer connected to the woman's laptop. In a practiced, brisk move, she tore it off, slipped it into a clear plastic holder attached to a lanyard and handed it to me. “You'll need this to get in and out of the center,” she said. I nodded, trying to convey the sense that I had done this before, that I had done it dozens of times this year alone, without being rude. But she pressed on, perhaps unable to change course, conditioned by repetition into reciting the script set for her, as powerless as the neat little printer in front of her. “Sure, sure,” I said. Panic flickered in her eyes. “Just hang it around your neck—if you want to give your details to an exhibitor, they can scan the code here.” A blocky QR code was printed next to my name and that of my deliciously inscrutable employer:
NEIL DOUBLE. CONVEX
.

“Right,” I said.

“You can just hang it around your neck,” she repeated, indicating the lanyard as if I might have missed it. In fact it was hard to ignore: a repellent egg-yolk yellow ribbon with the name of the conference center stitched into it over and over.
METACENTER METACENTER METACENTER
.

“Right,” I said, stuffing the pass into my jacket pocket.

“Buses leave every ten or fifteen minutes. They stop right outside. And here's your welcome pack.” She handed me one of the folders, smiling like an LED.

I smiled back. “Thanks so much,” I said. And I was fairly sincere about it. It's a good idea to stay friendly with the staff at these conferences; I doubted I would see her again, but it was better to be on the safe side. Generally it was a waste of time trying to sleep with them, though—they often couldn't leave their post, and they were kept busy. She had already moved on from me, directing her smile over my shoulder to whoever stood behind me. I saw that she had access to scores of disgusting emergency-services-yellow tote bags from a box beside her, but she had not offered one to me. A shrewd move on her part; I was pleased by her reading of my level of MetaCenter-tote-desire, which was clearly broadcasting at just the right pitch.

Breakfast was served in the restaurant, separated from the lobby by a sliding glazed wall. Flexible space, ready for expansion or division into a large number of different configurations. A long buffet table was loaded with pastries, bread, sliced fruit and cereals. Shiny steel containers sweated like steam-age robot wombs. Flat-screen TVs with the news on mute, subtitles appearing word by word. Current affairs karaoke. I poured coffee into an ungenerous cup from a pot warming next to jugs of orange, grapefruit and tomato juice, and put an apricot Danish and a fistful of sugar sachets on a plate. Then I started my hunt for somewhere to sit. Perhaps half of the seats were taken—lively conversation surrounded me. When a hotel is filled with people all attending the same conference, breakfast can present all sorts of diplomatic hurdles. I am rarely gregarious, and at breakfast time I am at my least social, always preferring to sit alone. This was in no way unusual—the hubbub disguised the fact that many of the diners here were alone, studying phones or newspapers or laptops. The first morning of an event can be the least social, before people fall into two-day friendships and ad hoc social bubbles. But I still had to be careful not to blank anyone who had come to recognize me. At other conferences, I might run into the same people once or twice a year. This one was different. These people I see all the time, everywhere; I am getting to know some of them; far worse, they are getting to know me. My detachment is a crucial part of what I do—these people don't understand that. They love to think of themselves as a “community”; they thrive on “relationships.” No “community” includes me. But try telling them that. Or rather, don't try. Try telling them nothing. Adam had been most specific: keep a low profile.