A Convergence Of Birds (10 page)

The colors in the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game are mostly primary, the ambient music that of a rollicking hurdy-gurdy, and the dispersed aromas range from those of ice cream parlors and fireworks to hot asphalt, pencil sharpeners, and the seaside, depending on where one finds oneself in the hotel, and when. Indeed, there is, though not easy to find, a seaside beach somewhere in the hotel where the hurdy-gurdy melodies fade away behind the sounds of sand and pebbles sucking sea water, waves slapping against wooden piers, and the cries of wheeling gulls. There are shellfish expeditions here, daily beach parties featuring sand castle building and blindman’s buff on the boardwalk, and fishing competitions from the piers, where one catches not fish but fortunes, and sometimes toy cars or plastic earrings. Transoceanic excursions can be arranged for guests on extended stays, with overnights in the Tropical Island Beach Hut, which can also be reached by taking the Ferris wheel to the sixth floor, if one can find it (it is not between the fifth and seventh).

At the top of the hotel in the middle of a set of Chinese boxes is the Game Room (this is not the casino, which is called The Schoolyard), where management and staff meet with the design team to plot out each day’s activities and the structural adjustments required. It is here that all the jokes and riddles are dreamed up and the fun invented. It is widely assumed (the hotel’s publicity department encourages this public assumption) that these Game Room meetings are the happiest games of all at the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game, yet witnesses who have stumbled onto the Game Room looking in vain for their own rooms have reported dim lights, a heavy air faintly redolent of old shoes and books, and a prevailing mood of inwardness and preoccupation, melancholy, wistfulness, in which, say, the blowing of a soap bubble would be a cause for tears.

THE GRAND HOTEL NYMPHLIGHT

Although childhood is the source and model of all architecture, grand hotels included, the Grand Hotel Nymphlight is the only one known to be specifically devoted to “the child within,” as the hotel brochure puts it. Uniquely situated—it is in reality a hotel within a hotel—the Grand Hotel Nymphlight features all-glass construction, playhouse dimensions, dreamlike decor, common dormitories and restrooms, and, through innovative engineering, the literal re-experience of one’s own lost childhood. The universal desire to be a child again, full of innocent wonder and spontaneity and extravagant joy (as advertised), while yet knowing what one knows as an adult, is realized at checkin time, when, by way of a warm bath administered by the hotel staff, the guests are returned for twenty-four hours to their prepubescent physical and spiritual condition, free of all adult anxieties and repressions and perversities, albeit wiser in the ways of the world, dressed in their own clothing from that time, if they have supplied it, else from clothing specially fashioned for them from photographs, and sent out to play with other children their seeming age or, if they wish, to enter into and explore their own pasts in an interactive museum whose exhibits change with each new set of guests.

Admission into the Grand Hotel Nymphlight is not easily obtained, not only because it is the most popular of all the grand hotels, booked up months, even years, in advance, but also because those seeking entry are required to provide a vast array of support materials to assist the engineering staff in all their recreative tasks, including photographs and films, drawings, clothing, games and toys, dolls, balls, uniforms, comic books, names and types of pets, and lists of everything from childhood sports and hobbies, favorite foods, books, and movies to happiest and saddest moments, secret childtime wishes, dreams. Merely to have kept or remembered all these things is enough to suggest that the prospective guest who supplies them is ideally suited for an overnight in the hotel. There are many, of course, who long for such an experience but who have few or no support materials to offer, and, though it is against hotel policy, they often borrow these things from others or buy new. They thereby relive a childhood they never knew—one probably more delightful than their own forgotten one, for delight is the principal aim of the hotel—whereupon their night in the Grand Hotel Nymphlight becomes in effect their “true memory” of childhood. As it ought, for to be without any other is a sad thing. All guests must leave behind some of the support materials they have brought—usually a toy plus an article or two of clothing—as partial payment for their stay, and these items become the property of the hotel management. Children who are children now are also admitted, and much more freely, partly to intensify the experience of the children from other times, but also simply because they are loved. For them, the room rates are exceptionally low, especially if unaccompanied by an adult, usually little more than a frock, a shirt, a hairband or bracelet, a toy. Thus, one cannot be sure if it is a real child one is playing with or an adult reliving her childhood, and this is part of the joy and wonder of it all.

If the playhouse dimensions make full-grown adults feel ill at ease, that was probably the original intention of the architect, though it was also necessary to create a structure that would fit comfortably and unobtrusively within the Hotel Lost Domain, which embraces it; not itself one of the grand hotels, being imitative (neo-Gothic in a depressed sort of way) and of little architectural significance, yet nearly as popular as the hotel which it contains, and especially with the elderly. The Hotel Lost Domain has but one compellingly attractive feature, which is the sole reason for its popularity: All its rooms peer in upon the Grand Hotel Nymphlight. From them, one can immerse oneself all day in the magical world of children—and all night, too, for what is more pleasurable than watching, unwatched, sleeping boys and girls, their dreams on view like ghostly videos? Some of the Lost Domain clientele are virtually permanent residents, but others include prospective and past guests of the Nymphlight, as well as friends and loved ones of the current guests. Couples usually check in to the Nymphlight to play together on this one chance in life that they have, especially lovers of different ages who for a night can be, together, ten again, but some go singly, their partners taking a room in the Lost Domain to revel in the sight of their beloved in the shape of a playing child.

Is there, as is sometimes rumored, another hotel embracing the Lost Domain, wherein watchers watch the watchers and the watched as well? No, that’s more likely just a fantasy of the popular press, one metaphor propagating another in the common way, though as a safety precaution the security staff of the Nymphlight does have cameras in place in both hotels. Not that there is much risk of dangerous or unseemly behavior. There is probably no hotel in the world more chaste in its design and policy with respect to children than the Grand Hotel Nymphlight, none more devoted to innocence, purity, and simple childish delight. Even the nightmares are largely avoided, their screenings interrupted with sweet motherly murmurs, and though murder, rape, war, cruelty, torture, beatings, abuses, and horrors of every sort are common experiences of preadolescence everywhere, there’s little of any of that here, unless specifically introduced in the memorabilia of a guest, for these things are of the world without, not the child within. The residents of the Lost Domain, however, are not so scrupulously screened as those in the Nymphlight, and the sight of a hotelful of ruddy little smooth-skinned cherubs, candidly doing all the little things they do, can be improperly arousing to perverse or weak natures. Even among divided lovers, there can arise an irresistible urge to break through the glass barrier to embrace one’s lover, deliciously virginal again. The children, however, are always completely safe from outsiders, protected by the glass firewall that divides the grown-up hotel from the inner child’s hotel, such that even though there have been rare occasions of obscene public behavior, they have been mostly out of view of the young and seeming young.

No, the true dangers of the Grand Hotel Nymphlight lie more in the intrusion upon one’s own childhood without the grace of childhood ignorance, for it is not always a good thing (how often we tell children this!) to obtain what one most desires. One may have prepared oneself before checking in for the possible unearthing of forgotten fears and anxieties, not least those of the playground, and one might even have foreseen that some of the most joyous moments in the hotel would, at the same time, knowing what one knows, be profoundly melancholic, augmenting rather than relieving one’s sense of loss (some little guests, playing their hearts out, weep the while, as children often do), but one cannot anticipate the panic that can seize a guest who suddenly, too late, repents of his or her decision. Sometimes this happens already in the bath, but, even though this may give rise to a great thrashing about, there is no undoing what has begun until its full course has been run. Others, momentarily entranced by the seductive pleasures of the bath, are struck by terror only upon entering into the company of the other children, and terrified not by the others but by their own strange, confused, and diminished selves, by their appalling and ruthless innocence, discovering in that instant that, while losing one’s childhood can be a sad thing, losing one’s adulthood, even for a day (if it’s only a day! what is happening? I can’t remember!), can be catastrophic. Twenty-four hours is a long time, and to the restored child gripped by irrational panic it can seem forever. Of course, such exceptions cannot be allowed to spoil the fun for others. The hotel’s procedures for managing these episodes are mostly pharmaceutical and mostly successful, though somewhat at the expense of the guest’s pleasure, or his or her memory of it.

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED

c. 1950

18.25 x 11.5 x 6 in.

box construction

Bradford Morrow

And then I heard them lift a box,

And creak across my soul

With those same hoots of lead, again.

Then space began to toll…

—EMILY DICKINSON

THE WINTER DAY was as plain as flour paste, and outside your window the sunlight was of the same whiteness as your walls and ceiling. The moon had abandoned the sky the night before, and stars hid behind the haze. No meteors had fallen for us to esteem. Simply, the dead calm of your brother’s birthday reigned over this morning, as it had before dawn when night is at its most impervious depth. And all this plain white emptied shape provoked a spirited proposition, an inducement to one whose sole thoughts until then turned to you, and were sorry leaden things, sunken cakes, silent and without shape.

Mild morning December light made the grass look chalky, like dried milk, out in our backyard. Our quince tree, too, was white and reminded us of a carving in ivory. The blanched chairs we arranged back there at certain angles cast flat white shadows on the white lawn. The slow air—which toured our leaky house and traveled the yard and walked up into the quince tree, where it was cooled by the ghosts of songbirds and by the dazzling wintry sun—appeared to be whitewashed and rubbed. Robert, we were young. Mother was strong, our sisters were young. You were especially strong in your frailty. The world, too, was tenuous and promising only insofar as it was an empty white box. Thin air coveted this box and, through its silences, declared both itself and the box that held it unfulfilled. The birds might have echoed this dilemma with warning cries in the ivory quince, had they not abandoned us to such stifling quiet. I strained without success to hear their tolling.

No time passed. Not a day, nor a fortnight, nor a year. All but the balmy, gone birds remained the same, as we thought, What to do? What to do?

You remember, dear Robert, old owl, that when they migrated months ahead of schedule that particular year, they left behind a pasteboard parrot in their wake—a collective gesture meant as a kindness, surely, but who could ever be sure? Meant perhaps to soothe those whom they’d fled—who could blame them? I did not—and left us alone in our clapboard house, left our garden chair beneath that tree, slumbering in old, abundant solitude. What did those many birds mean by such gestures of leaving? You said, although you might not have said it in just these words: Birds only partly succeed in fulfilling certain half-finished thoughts and half-made promises, since, now, aren’t we reminded once more of how silent and colorless the world can be without them in it? Whereas the breathing world may feel their absence, we feel the difficult presence of their not being in the quince, or under the eaves or on this windowsill.

So you said, Robert, on that plainest day, that once. And though there were no cardinals or jays in the boughs for my Christmas Eve birthday we decided the tree should not be cut down.

Paste real wings on the treacherous parrot but it would not fly away. Or so you tell me and so I believe you. Look at it, proud there, pretty and arrogant and anything but dumbfounded, with its evidently orange beak, and with feathers so blue they bring tears to your eyes and to the eyes of Mother and Helen and Elizabeth, too. You say, Let’s keep it. I don’t see these blues and oranges but keep my blindness to myself. The parrot seemed to be low maintenance, as pets go, and so I agreed, nodding. You noted my silence in the matter even as you swore the parrot was not colorless, let alone invisible. It perched on your ceiling that morning, observing us just as you watched it, our mother and sisters staring upward, too. Live and let live, I thought, but wondered if we were to be its keepers or its pets, wondered if we weren’t the invisibles, while parrot, Chinese quince, the sunless sky beyond your constant bed, and even the narrow yard below were the truer presences.

Visible or not, this parrot did display no interest in the crackers I set out on the newspaper, near the cage that I had made for it out of wooden clothes hangers—remember? Remember how I wanted to paint the parrot’s beak a dark orange to suggest my deeper yearning, but could not? Even the water in the clear little plastic bowl hung inside the cage evaporated before the parrot had any chance to consider whether thirst might motivate it to drink. Shall I paint the water blue?