The Way Inn (7 page)

It was a tedious waste of time, and he knew it; but it had given him the idea for conference surrogacy. “One man representing thirty, forty executives—imagine the savings! All this sentimental bullshit that gets dished out about face-to-face, firm handshakes, eye to eye . . . all these body parts that are supposedly so important . . . it's all just so . . .” He reached for an insult. “. . . So fucking analog.”

When he quit the trend analysts to set up Convex, I joined him. The thirty thousand pounds I inherited from my father, that joined, too, invested in the business. It was all I had and, with a value-engineered salary mostly paying for a one-bedroom flat, and none of the clubability that men like Laing have, it was all I had been likely to have, ever.

Once the discussion started, Laing stopped staring at me to join in. I was too distracted by his presence on the stage to listen to what was being said. Graham was a false name; Graham was Laing; and Laing was the man behind Meetex, the man who had found exhibitors for the fair and set the program for the conference. Why would he want to know about conference surrogacy? He had to be here; it was his gig. If anyone loved fairs and conferences, it was him. I knew where I had seen him before now: not from personal acquaintance, but in photographs—photographs in the welcome pack, photographs in
Summit
, photographs everywhere. Laing shaking hands, Laing cutting ribbons. He was a true believer, and I had told him about Convex. It was unnerving.

The panel were discussing intellectual property. Businesses in the Far East were sending people to trade fairs to photograph the products and fill wheelbarrows with brochures, so they could manufacture knockoff products based on the information. Furniture and consumer goods manufacturers were worried—could anything be done to protect them from the copycats? Laing had not made a contribution for a while. Then he leaned in and spoke.

“It's not just our exhibitors who should be concerned about piracy,” he said. “We should as well. Conference pirates exist. They exist, and they're here now.”

A murmur of uneasy amusement passed through the audience. Maurice flipped his notebook over to a fresh page.

“I'm quite serious,” Laing said, addressing the hall. “Conference pirates. I met one earlier today.” He had been scanning the audience, and as he said this his eyes fixed on me.

My first instinct was to laugh. Pirate—it was absurd. The modern meanings of the term—downloaders and desperate Somalians and Swedish political parties—were well known to me. But all the event director's invocation of it generated for me was a burst of kitsch imagery: peg legs, parrots, rum,
X
marks the spot. Not me at all.

“He works for a company called Convex,” Laing continued. “They say they can give their customers the benefit of attending a conference without actually having to attend. They send someone in your place—a double, let's say. And it costs less than attending the conference because this . . . double . . . can represent several people. You get a report. Meanwhile we only sell one ticket where we might have sold ten or twenty—it's our customers being skimmed off. And they denigrate the conference industry, say that conferences are a waste of everyone's time, while selling a substandard product in our name.”

All this time, Laing had stared me, and I began to fear that others in the hall might be figuring out who he was talking about. One other pair of eyes was certainly on me: Maurice was rapt.

Laing's attention flicked away from me. He was warming to his theme, wallowing in his own righteousness, letting his oration build to a courtroom climax. “Lawful or not,” he said, high color apparent in his cheeks, “this practice, this so-called conference surrogacy, is piggybacking on the hard work of others in order to make a quick profit—which is on a natural moral level dubious, unhealthy, unethical and simply wrong!”

I was being prosecuted. Unable to respond, I wriggled in my seat and felt my own color rise to match Laing's. How dare he! Flinging slurs around without giving me a space to reply, naming our company in particular—it was unbearable. I imagined springing to my feet, challenging Laing, giving him the cold, hard, facts right between the eyes. We identified a need and we are supplying a service that fulfills it. That's the free market. If Laing's events were more interesting, more useful, less time-consuming and less expensive, there would be no need for us. Conferences and trade fairs are almost always tedious in the extreme. People would pay good money to avoid going to them. They do pay good money—to me. All this moral outrage was just a smoke screen for the basic failure of his product. The muscles in my legs primed themselves. I was ready.

“I've got to run,” I whispered to Maurice. And with that I scuttled from the room. I have no idea if anyone other than Laing and Maurice even noticed.

From the lecture hall, I marched down one of the concourses of the MetaCenter conference wing, passing many people strolling between venues or talking in small groups, that damned yellow bag seemingly on every other shoulder. I felt extremely hot in the hands and face. I was moving without a destination clearly in mind, moving forward to keep the unsteadiness from stealing into my muscles. All I wanted was to clear the area of Emerging Threats before the hall emptied out; then, all I wanted was to be off the concourse, away from the other conference-goers, the sight of whom filled me with hatred. Laing had tricked me, and trapped me, and it was hard not to implicate everyone at Meetex in the deed.

When I saw the sign for some restrooms, I stopped. In the frosty fluorescent light of the toilets, I splashed cold water on my face, trying to get my surface temperature back down and gather myself together. A couple of other men were using the urinals and the other sinks—I ignored them, trying to weaponize the normal mutual invisibility pact that pertains at urinals so that they would literally disappear. There was no way they could have been in the same hall as me, no way they could have seen what just happened to me, but I still didn't want them looking at me, the pirate gnawing away at their livelihoods. I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink, pale though not red-faced as I had feared, skin wet, a drop of water clinging to my chin. Tired, maybe. The tube lights flickered and stuttered—an item on a contractor's to-do list, one of the hundreds of glitches that infest new buildings. Plasma rolled in the tubes. Sometimes it's new buildings that have ghosts, not old ones; new buildings are not yet obedient. New buildings are not yet ready for us. I wanted to be back in my room at the Way Inn, and I realized that it was already that time. Leaving now was no kind of retreat; it was what I always planned to do.

In something like a trance I left the MetaCenter, its fire-minded evacuation conduits directing me without fuss to the departure point for the shuttle buses. Between the canopied assembly area outside the conference center and the bus, there was the briefest moment of weather, something the planners of the site had made every effort to minimize but which still had to be momentarily sampled. It came as a shock after hours in the climate-controlled halls. The dead white sky was marbled with ugly gray, and in the coach the heater was running. Barely half a dozen other passengers accompanied me; the late-afternoon rush back to the hotels had yet to truly begin, and we got moving almost immediately. I sat slumping in my seat as my memories of what had just taken place flexed and froze. It was all malformed in my mind: instances running together with no clear impression of what had been said or what it meant. We passed through acres of empty car parks, like fields razed black after harvesting.

The sign for the Way Inn, a red neon roadside obelisk on an unplanted verge, was as welcome as the lights of a tavern on an ancient snow-covered mountainside. It was a breath of everywhere, offering the same uncomplicated rooms and bland carpet at similar rates in any one of hundreds of locations worldwide. On seeing it, I smiled, perhaps the first time I had smiled naturally all day. And then, as I tried to recall where I had stowed the keycard for my room, I realized that I had left my bag under the chair in the lecture hall. Nothing of great value was lost—my keycard, wallet, mobile phone and other significant personal possessions were all in my pockets. But the leaflets, press releases and advertising materials I had gathered, the price cards and fact sheets, and the Meetex information pack with its maps and timetables, were all gone. Would they be found and moved to a lost property office? Unlikely. Fliers and brochures look like litter in the slightest change of light. A day's work thrown away—the bag had contained my pages of notes too. I would have to cover much of the same ground again tomorrow. This was frustrating, even infuriating, but somehow it managed to refresh me. The debilitating tangle that had hobbled my thoughts was cut straight through by the loss, which felt somehow auspicious—a way of severing my connection to that catastrophe of a day and leaving it in the past. As I walked through the glass doors of the Way Inn, my mood was much restored.

The hotel lobby was almost empty. Flat-screens showed the news without sound. Behind their desk, the reception staff were chatting in lowered voices. Other than them and the handful of returning conference-goers—who drifted, unspeaking, toward the lifts and stairs—there were a couple of lone, suited men sitting in the blocky black leather-and-chrome armchairs, reading newspapers or studying laptops. No one sat at the Meetex registration table—the information packs, tote bags, lanyards and other bric-a-brac had been cleared away, and only the banner remained, now clearly false. You can no longer register here.

I took the stairs to the second floor, not wanting to find myself cooped up in a lift with any Meetex people. But when I reached my floor I became disoriented. It was not that the hallway was unfamiliar—on the contrary, it looked equally familiar in both directions, and I couldn't readily tell which way lay my room, number 219. For a moment I tried to figure it out from where the lift stood in relation to the stairs in the lobby, and where I stood now, but it was not possible. I was thrown by the stairs' dogleg between floors, the way they doubled back on themselves to end above where they began. And I could not be at all certain of my other calculations regarding the relationship between my room and the lift shaft—walking casually, following signs to the lift, it was quite possible to make a turn without thinking, and certainly without remembering it. Ahead, opposite the stairs, windows looked out onto a courtyard containing one of those neat little Japanese meditation gardens. Across the courtyard was a row of windows, tinted metallic blue and opaque to me. This was definitely the courtyard that was next to reception—where was that in relation to my room? Was there more than one courtyard?

I picked a direction almost at random, relying on a sliver of instinct, and was rewarded with a promising ascent of room numbers—210, 211, 212, 213. Between each door and the next hung an abstract painting, all from the same series—intersecting latte and mocha fields. The corridor took a right angle in one direction, and then in the opposite direction. Facing 220, beside a painting of a fudge-colored disc barging into a porridgy expanse scattered with swollen chocolate drops, was 219. I inserted my keycard in the slot on the door lock and nothing happened. The little red light above the door handle remained red. The door was still locked, the handle was unmoving. I withdrew the card and tried again. Nothing. A lead pellet of frustration dropped in my stomach. I flipped the card over and inserted it again. The red light glowed insolently, refusing to turn green. I tried a fourth time, this time jiggling, cajoling, exercising force of will. The world, or at least my immediate surroundings, remained spectacularly unchanged—the red light, the immobile handle, the sleeping doors of the other rooms, the paintings, the faint perfume of cleaning fluid, the soft background hum of the hotel's air conditioning, which to my ears now sounded a note of complacency, an indifference to the injustice of the world.

Irritated, I returned down the corridor to the stairs and descended to the lobby. The same suited men in the same armchairs, still reading the same newspapers. The staff at the front desk heard my purposeful approach and looked up, smiling benignly.

“I'm locked out of my room,” I said, flashing a brief, formal smile of my own. “My keycard doesn't seem to want to work. It's two-nineteen.”

The man behind the desk beamed at me. He was young, no more than early twenties, and wore—like all his colleagues—a long-sleeved, red polo shirt with buttons at the collar and Way Inn embroidered in white over the breast. “This can happen sometimes,” he said in accented English; Dutch, maybe. “Have you had your card in your pocket with perhaps your keys and your cell phone?” Keish, shelfon. “The card can lose its magnetism. Please, let me see it.”

I gave the man the card. It disappeared from sight beneath the counter to be reenchanted. Seconds passed, and I took in the reception desk. Above it, Way Inn was spelled out in bold Perspex letters, lit red from behind. The desk was more a counter on my side, high enough that it required me to raise my elbows if I wanted to rest them on the dark, polished wood.

“OK then,” the young man said. “That should work just fine now—let's go see.” He stood, eagerly, my keycard still in his hand.

“That's really not necessary,” I said. “I can let myself . . .”

But the helpful fellow was up and out from behind the desk, heading toward the rear of the lobby in a determined straight line. Watching the man's back, I noted with dismay that he was aimed at the elevators rather than the stairs. “Surely the stairs . . .” I began, again, but the man had pressed the button and smiled a prim little smile at me. We waited together, an awkward, chaste moment. I tried to look as if I was preoccupied with matters of grave importance; the staffer looked up, as if blessed with X-ray vision and able to see the lift approaching through layers of concrete and breezeblocks.