A Convergence Of Birds (9 page)

Which is to say: back in the real world once more, safely removed from the impossible fantasy of one’s own incomprehensible passage through what are known beyond the hotel as time and world. Behind the front desk, the bright open expanse of the lobby gives way to the comforting shadows of the intricately compartmentalized interior, with its ancient twisted staircases that rise and fall like heaving waves, its muffled whir and whisper of dreams past seeking to reconstitute themselves, and its meandering labyrinth of dark wainscoted corridors with their seemingly infinite series of dissolving and reemerging doors. Discreet night porters are available as guides and translators for the inexperienced, and room service offers a full range of scientific and whimsical instruments, mechanical devices, and recording equipment to assist all voyagers in their explorations. Which for many begin even before a room is entered, such peace and harmony do they find here. The pleasure felt by the travelers as they penetrate the hotel’s innermost recesses is reciprocal: The hotel, too, seems to experience a profound elemental harmony as it fills with guests, and, as the night deepens, the entire Grand Hotel Night Voyage, afloat now in its rich blue fog, begins slowly to expand and contract as if taking great reposeful breaths.

THE GRAND HOTEL PENNY ARCADE

At the very heart of the Grand Hotel Penny Arcade, encased in blue glass and pale as porcelain, floats a sleeping princess, gracefully coiling and uncoiling, clothed only in her own purity, her eyes open but unseeing. Her slow liquid movements, contained in an architecture that is both formal and evocative, are those of a sleepwalker: elaborate, balletic, silent, unrelated to her austere geometric surroundings. Though she is, as seen, a lonely figure, she does not seem to suffer from loneliness. She appears much of the time to find herself amid imagined multitudes, waving, greeting friends, dancing, eating, posing, petting a dog or cat, climbing into a car, disembarking a train, shopping, lifting children onto horses or carnival rides, or being lifted. Yet, there is an element of shy restraint in even her most open gestures, the suggestion of an innocent child’s uncertainty in the face of the rude world, and an unwillingness to embrace it fully, as if to do so might awaken her from the private world in which she so restfully and winsomely resides. She is both utterly exposed yet secretive, transparent yet evasive and mysterious. The princess of solitude.

The guest rooms of the hotel, all decorated in marine blue and permeated with the faint sweet aroma of youthful flesh, encircle the sleeping princess on several levels, each room with its own individual coin-operated peephole viewers, viewers technically augmented by manual zoom lenses, tracking and lock-on mechanisms worked with a crank, and simulated kinetoscopic flickering. As the princess is never completely still, or almost never, no room is particularly privileged, so room rates are the same for all, though each visitor is known to have her or his preference. Although some first-timers feel compelled by nature to zoom in on her private parts, so-called (the princess’s private parts, as they eventually discover, are all hidden deeply within), most viewers come to prefer close-ups of her face, thrilled by the illusion that the dreamer is sometimes gazing directly at them as if in recognition, or else they select more distant views of her whole figure, in movement or at rest. The classic perspective. Some leave their rooms to take in the full panorama from the open galleries on the top level, while others prefer not to watch at all, but only to be told what others are seeing that they might more fully imagine her. “What is she doing now?” “It’s as if she were playing in a schoolyard, skipping rope!” “Describe the movements of her arms and legs!” “Do you not want to hear about her little breasts?” “First, her arms and legs!” Day or night, the deep blue of the hotel’s interior and the subdued lighting create a reflective nocturnal mood, making stays at the Grand Hotel Penny Arcade seem more like seances, as some have said when signing the guestbook: “It felt like an encounter with my own lost soul. I shall return again and again.” Slowed-down, melancholic movie house organ tunes can be heard during viewings, but, though associated with the princess’s languid movements, they emerge more as sourceless room aura, a device incorporated by the architect to make the admirers of the princess feel a part of what they are witnessing, rather than mere voyeurs.

The accusation of voyeurism, it must be said, has hovered over the hotel since its opening. Hailed in the travel and arts journals as an architectural triumph and a must-stop for all travelers (“The Grand Hotel Penny Arcade restores risk and ingenuity to architecture, managing an air of sophistication without ostentation, charm without quaintness, truth without didacticism, as it strives heroically toward an abstract ideal of feminine beauty and structural harmony…”), it was at the same time in the tabloids the subject of scurrilous cartoons and prurient rumors. In those days, many men and some women ventured here, hoping to awaken the dancing sleeper with whatever it took, and others came to watch this happen, but all left chastened by the awareness that not only was she a princess who did not await a prince, she was, even in her doll-like nakedness, the very image of eternal innocence, eliciting not carnal desire but profound awe and affection and something, mysteriously, like hope. Indeed, were she clothed, as the architect noted in his famous homily on the transcendent radiance of her buttocks, and of the buttocks of women in general, she would immediately be dated and placed, and he wanted her to remain forever universal and timeless.

Even with the fading of the controversy, however, some questions have remained. Is she, for example, as claimed in the hotel brochure, alive, or is she some kind of elaborate automaton, a projection, in effect, of the architect’s fantasy? And if alive, how did she come upon her strange fate and will she ever be released from it, even if she does not want to be? On the other hand, if she, who seems more alive than any of those watching her, is not alive, then what are they? Anxiety-arousing questions, bordering, in short, on the realm of the uncanny. Which may speak to the architect’s genius for provocation; or it may speak to his confusion. For his adoration of his structural centerpiece has seemed to go beyond mere aesthetics. He is known, when she is the subject, to speak, not only of form and function, body and movement, but of tenderness, generosity, pathos, sincerity, and an ineffable longing for a lost past, almost as if she had ceased being a structural component of his architectural inventions and had become the object, in a word, of his amorous obsession. Has what began as artistic adventure and celebration become, for him as well as for her, inescapable entrapment? If so, then what is for guests an enriching and consoling connection to the eternal verities (as advertised in the hotel brochure), is for the architect, who is not known to have constructed anything since the Grand Hotel Penny Arcade, a tragic estrangement.

THE GRAND HOTEL GALACTIC CENTER

The most courageous of the grand hotels is the Grand Hotel Galactic Center, home of the Big Bang Milk Bar, the Transcendental Massage Parlor, and the Celestial Ballet, performed nightly, hotel weather permitting. It is approached by way of a labyrinth of narrow twisted streets, a maze that often thwarts the novice, making the hotel, which is in the very heart of the city, seem mythic and remote, improbable even. Once found, however, it has a startling thereness that can never ever after be entirely avoided, its compelling curves catching the eye at almost any turning. For the architect has here abandoned the traditional stacking of windowed blocks, with their sober geometry of grid-like patterning and their compartmentalized rooms and corridors like button boxes or museum cases, in favor of a structure built entirely of translucent interlocking spheres, creating the illusion of a great cosmic vastness within an architectural space said to be the smallest of all the grand hotels. A feature of the hotel, much ballyhooed in its brochure (“Practical Hints”), is that every room has an overhead view of the night sky, though there is some suspicion, never proved, that this is occasionally accomplished with mirrors and projectors. The sky is exposed each evening at sundown with the slow drawing back of what the hotel calls its “cloud cover,” much as sheets might be pulled away from a freshly made bed, bringing on a spectacle described by guests as “awesome,” “heart-stopping,” “elemental,” and “big!”

This theme of cosmic grandeur is carried out throughout the hotel, from the twinkling fairy lights suspended everywhere in background black light and the T. M. Parlor with its gravity-free rubdown bubble-rooms (“Out of the body through the body!”) to the hotel elevators, which seemingly lift their passengers on small platforms through the opening immensity of the Milky Way. At the top is the Big Bang Milk Bar, in reality an automat diner offering packaged food and soda pop, for the regulars at the Grand Hotel Galactic Center care little for passing gustatory pleasures, their minds being wholly on the permanent, the infinite. Sensualists find even the transcendental massages disappointing, as no hands are used, only subtle changes in atmospheric pressure within the spinning white bubbles wherein the massaged serenely float. A deep silence reigns throughout the hotel, broken only by a faint electric crackle and the hushed murmurs, as the cloud cover is pulled back, of awed guests.

Of course, gazing fixedly upon infinity is not without its risks. If the guestbook is to be believed, many have been driven mad by it, though it’s equally possible they were already somewhat crazed, or at least eccentric, when, drawn by the alluring sadness, the alluring terror, they first came here. Others have simply disappeared as though swallowed up by the hotel itself, causing some to believe that the old joke about the black hole at the core of the bubbly edifice might not be a joke after all. The staff smilingly deny it, though even they will admit that the hotel’s peculiar arrangement of intersectored spheres, some visible, some invisible, has necessarily left occasional spiky voids, tiny irregular patches of negativity, which they insist, however, are harmless. Unfortunately, these rumored disappearances and structural anomalies have lured to the Galactic Center persons intent not on contemplation but on suicide, and these sad gray figures can be seen at all hours, even during performances of the Celestial Ballet, drifting melancholically through the silent hotel, feeling the walls for unmarked passages and secret doors, falling asleep in the massage bubbles, lingering near air shafts and leaning against the starry walls of the elevators, hoping to get sucked painlessly into the arms of dark eternity.

Though not completely successful, and having acquired over the years a weathered, timeworn look unsuited to the purity of its quest (partly due to reckless abuse from some of the guests, especially the anarchic young, in whom the grandeur of the cosmos all too often inspires wild and irresponsible behavior), the hotel nevertheless still expresses much of the architect’s original noble desire to provide the guests—through an exuberant display of classical form conjoined with clarity of vision and an eye for the absolute—a certain architectonic reassurance, stimulation, serenity, inspiration. “Reverie and revelation,” as the brochure says. It was perhaps this emphasis on the spiritual that led to the hotel’s well-known material defects, serious enough for it to be in constant danger of losing one or more of its stars and being downgraded to the Petit or Ordinary Hotel Galactic Center. The furnace room is said to be particularly dangerous, for example, and the building, under perpetual reconstruction due to the lack of a sustaining kingpost and weak foundations, has virtually nonexistent emergency exit facilities and suffers frequent power failures. But in spite of its—admittedly fundamental—flaws, the Galactic Center retains, thanks to the architect’s whimsical genius of expression, a prevailing and compensatory lightheartedness, such that a night spent in it can be both majestic and frivolous, terrifying and consoling, deranging and healing, harmonious and chaotic. As one guest (who, alas, later disappeared) put it: “The Galactic Center: C’est moi.”

THE GRAND HOTEL FORGOTTEN GAME

Unlike many of the other grand hotels, the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game is as easy to find as closing one’s eyes and opening them again. The front desk, on the other hand, is deeply concealed within a labyrinth of movable panels of wood and glass and is shifted about from hour to hour, making checking into the hotel the first game one is obliged to play here, though by no means the most difficult. It is child’s play compared, for example, to finding one’s room afterwards. At the entrance, on the revolving doors (which are tricky; not everyone gets inside on the first try), there is posted a quotation, attributed to a 19th-century saint, that reads: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Though newcomers might be baffled by such an announcement, Forgotten Game regulars understand it to be a clue, by reverse logic, to finding the front desk: Locate yourself in a safe place and let the front desk come to you.

The rooms, however, can be accessed only by Ferris wheels and carousels (there are no elevators, stairs, or ordinary corridors, though one learns to recognize certain playgrounds and amusement parlors as secret routes of passage), such that the odds of being dropped off at one’s room are about the same as those of winning at roulette. Nor is reaching one’s door—if one ever does—the end of the game, for inserting the key can cause the floor in front of the door to drop away (the guessing and singing of “the song of the day” while inserting the key can prevent this) and send the guest flying down a ramp of wooden rollers past holes in the wall at which other guests are shooting with paint guns. The chute continues all the way to the bottom of the hotel, where it releases the splattered guest into the alleyway at the back, and the process begins all over again.

The hotel staff are all delightfully charming and kind, given to generous laughter, warm embraces, and amusing aphorisms, and playing hide-and-seek with the chambermaids and bellhops is not only encouraged, it is the only way to get breakfast or have your bed made, but it is useless to ask them for directions or advice when lost in the hotel. Not only are they instructed to provide only false clues and misinformation, many of them are deceivingly lifelike automata, programmed to provide random replies no matter what the questions. But clues are to be found everywhere; one need only look and sensibly puzzle out what one sees. Even the patterns of the colored sand in the sandboxes may provide directions, or the worn areas of carpets, the casual spray of jacks or marbles, the squawk of a parrot, candy wrappers behind a chair, a stack of alphabet blocks. At some point, one will probably lose track of one’s luggage, but once the room is found there will be luggage in it, probably not one’s own, but no matter. People dressing up in one another’s clothes is part of the hotel policy to get everyone playing together. Mail and messages are not delivered but are hidden about the hotel like Easter eggs, finders keepers, and indeed Easter bunnies (live and otherwise) are a cheerful decorative motif throughout. The restaurant menus are playing cards, and one must find a guest with a matching card before one can be served—as a pair, of course. The menus themselves list no dishes, only conundrums, such as What is the color of surprise? or Where exactly is the universe? or If time runs, where does it run to? or What does an egg mean? and the guests are served according to their answers, usually to their complete satisfaction. There are costume parties every night, if one can find them, with dancing contests and sack races and sing-alongs. The playful atmosphere has provoked new games, invented by the guests, like goosey gander, nipple tag, and musical beds, but these innovations are not encouraged by the management, and such guests often find themselves suddenly shooting the chutes once more and landing in the alley.