Page 13 of The Dream Hotel

D uring the night, the Santa Anas blew in from the east, tearing branches from trees and lashing them against the windows. The air is dry, and tainted with dust. Weather like this makes some people uneasy, causes them to have migraines or lose their keys or get into arguments with loved ones, yet Sara wakes feeling unusually rested. Her head still cradled by her pillow, she takes a deep breath, slowly emerging from her dream. She is miles and years away from Madison, sitting at a cozy booth in a French bistro, waiting for her husband to arrive. It’s extremely dark inside; it must be the young ma?tre d’s idea of mood lighting. She can’t see much beyond her table, and she’s even having trouble reading the menu, but the smell of meat braised in wine sauce is a harbinger of a great meal. God, she’s starving. She was so busy at work that she didn’t have time to get lunch. It doesn’t matter what’s on the menu, she’ll eat anything. “Sorry I’m late,” her husband says as he slides in next to her.

“It’s okay,” she replies. “I just got here myself.” She leans in to kiss him. It is a deep kiss, a kiss that shows how happy she is to see him after an exhausting day at the museum, where the exhibit she helped research is about to open.

“I missed you,” he says in her ear, and kisses her again, his mouth warm against hers. A moment later, he reaches between the folds of her skirt. It’s unusual for him to do this in public, but the tablecloth hides his hand, and in any case it’s so dark in this restaurant she doesn’t think anyone will notice them. He runs his fingers slowly up her thighs, and when he comes up against her underwear she sits back, allowing him to slide it to the side. Gently, he opens her up. She’s already wet, and he begins to touch her, his motions slow and circular. She is so turned on that she will climax quickly, she can already tell. But as her eyes adjust to the darkness in the restaurant, she realizes that the man who’s pleasuring her isn’t her husband.

It’s Hinton.

She struggles to pull down her skirt and regain her composure. “How dare you?” she wants to scream, but what comes out of her mouth instead is a loud, helpless moan as ecstasy radiates all through her body. At a nearby table an elderly woman in a black coat has noticed what’s happening; she whispers something in her friend’s ear while pointing at Sara. Meanwhile, Hinton is kissing Sara’s neck, telling her how much he wants her, how much he still wants to do to her, and she finds herself reaching for his belt.

Sara sits up in her cot, fully conscious now. What happened to her? She has been feeling lonely these last few days, lonely and miserable—but is she that lonely? Being held at Madison for this long has put her out of sync with herself. At the thought that this embarrassing dream, too, has been recorded, she drops her face into her hands. Everything that ought to remain separate is getting mixed up; she’s losing her grip on reality. Then the bell rings, startling her.

Sara hates morning device check, hates the idea that she must be reminded of her detention the minute she’s awake, that any respite from captivity must be crushed immediately. She doesn’t feel ready to face Hinton. As he brings the scanner to her implant, she has to work on not drawing back from him. For some reason he smells like the outdoors today, like leaves or perhaps tree bark, conjuring images of a picnic at the park on a sunny afternoon. He’s a handsome guy, no question about it, and the scar on his neck adds a touch of mystery, or perhaps danger. Again, the memory of the pleasure he gave her returns. Afraid that her face might betray her, she drops her gaze to the floor.

This was only a dream, she tells herself, a few billion neurons firing in her brain, speaking in a pictographic language that no one could claim to master, not even the makers of the Dreamsaver. Perhaps the Santa Ana winds are affecting her, the spike of positive ions messing with her moods. The truth is that, except for his looks, she finds everything about Hinton repulsive, and especially the satisfaction he seems to derive from his job. What kind of a man enjoys working in a place like this?

But what kind of a woman, a voice inside her asks, dreams about a man like him?

—

If retention has taken everything from Sara, it has also given her something she didn’t realize she had lost: the time to read. Before breakfast, between shifts, during yard time, after dinner—minutes and sometimes hours she spends with her nose in a book, if only to ward off thoughts about Madison. Always she feels two contradictory impulses: to avoid thinking about her captivity, and thinking about it all the time. This morning she is on the third chapter of When We Came Together, which is about the Historical Records Survey, a little-known program that collected state, county, and local records, and archived the information on microfilm—at the time a state-of-the-art technology. The HRS was inexpensive, yet the valuable work it did stopped abruptly when the WPA was dissolved in 1943. There are still gaps in the national archives because the HRS was abandoned.

This is the kind of detail that makes the historian in Sara smile. If a record collection of the magnitude of the HRS, funded by the federal government and employing thousands of record keepers, can’t provide a completely accurate portrait of the past, why should she believe that the database maintained by the RAA is reliable? It’s an automated archive, but like ancient archives it, too, must have gaps. For starters, the RAA is missing information from all kinds of people: undocumented immigrants, people without fixed addresses, the few among the elderly or the disabled who don’t use smart devices, along with cranks, hermits, bohemians, and objectors.

Come to think of it, the girlfriend of Sara’s housemate at Berkeley was an objector. Back when Sara knew her, she was working on a Ph.D. in face recognition and seemed no different than any other graduate student in the Bay Area. Things changed when she won a large cash grant from the Scott Foundation. Everyone thought she would invest the money in setting up her own lab, or even use it as a down payment for an apartment, but instead she sank it into ten acres at the foothill of the Sierras, with a two-room cabin that barely had running water and electricity. She started spending all her time there, refurbishing the place modestly, buying non-smart appliances from thrift stores, and slowly getting herself off the grid. She even gave up her phone. Whenever she wanted to make a call or send an email, she had to ride her bike to the nearest town. Sara’s housemate, Leo, was sure this arrangement was temporary. “She’s writing her dissertation,” he would say, “she just needs peace and quiet to focus.” He kept saying that right until his girlfriend dropped out of the Ph.D. program. Only then did he realize she was committed to analog life—and broke up with her.

This was twelve years ago. At the time Sara thought Leo’s girlfriend was paranoid, but now the simplicity of her solution to the problem of surveillance is evident. The RAA can’t claim she constitutes a criminal risk to anyone; she would never end up in a place like Madison because they wouldn’t have much behavioral information on her, if any at all.

Now Sara wonders what an internet search might turn up for her name—if only she could remember it. It started with a D. The lines in Sara’s book blur as her mind drifts to those long-gone years. Once, Leo’s girlfriend helped Sara fix a bug on her computer and when she found out Sara’s folks were from Morocco, she started talking about her grandfather, who emigrated from Fes to Montreal, and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he married an Algerian, like him an immigrant determined to make it in the Golden State.

Curiosity drives Sara to the library, where she waits for a computer station to open up. Though she can’t remember the objector’s name, she does remember her housemate’s name, so she starts with that. She types “Leo Keane” and “Berkeley” and finds that he’s now working for an asset-management firm in New York. He’s sporting a shaved head these days, fashionable glasses, and dental veneers—a stark contrast to the bearded pothead Sara once knew. She adds different years to the search terms until she lands on travel photos Leo posted fifteen years ago when he went to Colorado for spring break. And there is the objector, standing next to Leo, squinting in the sunlight. The caption says her name is Dani. That’s it! Dani Senoussi. Armed with this information, Sara runs a new search, using different terms she can think of—“Berkeley,” “face recognition,” “computer science”—but aside from the papers Dani published when she was still in graduate school, there is nothing. It’s as if Dani has disappeared.

Sara drops the spring break photo into ImageBank, narrows the focus to Dani’s face, and hits Send . There are hundreds of millions of pictures sitting in all kinds of databases, so it takes a full thirty seconds for the search engine to find a match. It comes from an accident report in Sacramento ten years ago. A motorist hit a cyclist and two pedestrians, one of whom was left gravely injured. In the picture, a couple of medics are wheeling out a gurney for the pedestrian, while the cyclist is standing next to her bike, holding one arm in the other. It is Dani, with shorter hair and looser clothes, except that the caption says her name is Mary Brown.

So she gave them an alias. A common name that will muddy search results. To preserve shreds of her privacy she’d had to put on the gray uniform of a generic identity. She uses fake credentials everywhere. Buys burner phones and dumps them periodically. Wears sunglasses or face masks wherever cameras are present, which is everywhere. The only reason Sara was able to find a picture of Dani is that the car accident caught her off guard—the bandana around her face slipped off while she examined the injury to her arm. A mistake, perhaps, made in the first few years of her new life.

The cost of this freedom is steep. Dani has given up the convenience of traveling by car, plane, or subway. She’s stopped shopping in grocery stores that accept only electronic payments, which is nearly all of them. She doesn’t receive state alerts about flash floods, wildfires, and earthquakes. She can’t borrow large sums of money from a bank, or make significant transactions of any kind. She’s even renounced the pleasures of sitting on a park bench with the sun on her face or swimming in a public pool on a hot day. It’s a difficult life. Not to mention solitary.

But after all these years Dani might’ve found a solution to that, too.

Perhaps she’s joined one of those offline communities that have sprouted up in smaller towns. Twenty-Thirders, they’re called, because they log online only if needed, always from a secure connection, and for never longer than an hour per day. To minimize their digital footprint, they trade services and share resources, socialize almost exclusively with people who share their beliefs, and whenever they go out they wear clothing that distorts their features. The media treats Twenty-Thirders mostly as objects of fascination or, more often, ridicule. The police, of course, are openly suspicious of them, because who would go to all that trouble just to avoid ordinary technology?

But to Sara the very existence of the Twenty-Thirders is a source of hope.

—

Toya is standing in front of the thermostat again. The temperature is set to 60 and a downward arrow blinks on the display, but the room feels a good thirty degrees hotter. “This fucking place,” she mutters as she walks away. She opens a laundry bag and dumps its contents into the first washer, not bothering to spray any stains or check for forbidden items. She pours soap without measuring it, then slams the lid shut.

“I wonder if we should try it the other way,” Sara suggests. “Set this thing to 75, see what happens.”

“Go for it.”

But it doesn’t seem to make a difference; once all the machines are running, they’re both sweating through their uniforms. They sit at the table. Toya has her detective novel open in front of her, but Sara can tell she’s not reading because she hasn’t turned a single page. “So how’d your hearing go?”

Toya shakes her head. Not a minute later, she’s holding back tears. “When I came in,” she says, “they were chatting about baseball, joking around with each other like it was an ordinary day. I guess it was, for them. But when we got started, they laid out my whole life in front of me, bringing up shit I’d forgotten about, like the emails I sent to my cousin twenty-two years ago, telling him to wire me $3,500. I told them that he owed me that money because I’d paid for a trip he took to New York so he could do a training program there, and I really needed the cash for Christmas. But this guy at the table, he sucked his teeth like he didn’t believe a word out of my mouth. Then he started talking about my gambling debts.”

“What?”

“I know,” Toya says. “But I told them, is having debt illegal or did I miss the memo? I mean, I got carried away on the slot machines in Vegas last year, but I didn’t break any laws. It’s none of their damn business how much I owe to anybody. Well, they didn’t like that. One of them brought up this dream I kept having about burning down my house for the insurance money. He said my expertise was a liability.”

“Did they show you the dream?”

“Nu-uh, they just described it. But I remember it anyway, because I had it a few times that summer. I’m sitting on my porch with a group of friends, enjoying beers and hamburgers. Then later in the evening, after everyone leaves, I tip over the barbecue grill right there on the porch and let the fire do the rest. But why the fuck would I do that in real life? I love my house. My folks busted their backs to buy it, and I can’t afford to live anywhere else.” She closes the detective novel, smoothing its dog-eared cover with her palm. “I tried to explain to them that I was under a lot of stress from the claims I had to settle last year. I mean, I had to listen to so many people talking about everything they lost in the Tujunga fire that I was depressed and anxious all the time. But they didn’t care. They said the risk was real, and the fight I had in the exercise yard last month raised my score. So I got denied again.”

Sara reaches across the table and squeezes Toya’s arm. It’s a terrible thing, being denied release, a terrible thing. She composes her face carefully before she speaks, because she has no idea if what she’s about to say is true. “You’re gonna get out of here.” It’s the only consolation she can offer. And in truth she needs to hear it, too. But what she really wants to say is that she understands.

To put the awkwardness behind them, Sara returns to the thermostat. “You feel a difference?”

“Nope.”

“It feels like a hundred in here.”

“At least.”

“Why put it here, then? If they’re going to set the temperature from the other end, why bother having this display here and letting us think we can set our own temperature?”

“It doesn’t make sense. But then again—”

“They’re just fucking with us.” Sara bangs on the thermostat, presses the arrow button all the way down, bangs it again. None of it makes a detectable difference. There are moments when she feels like a guinea pig in a lab experiment, forced to submit to whatever tests the scientists have designed. How else to explain Safe-X’s decision to heat a utility room? Or why the water in the showers is adequately hot only in the afternoons? Or that week in February when, without warning or explanation, the same dinner was served for eight nights in a row? Only after a fight erupted in the cafeteria did MealSecure return to a regular menu. “Fuck it,” Sara snaps. She takes off her shirt, releasing a grassy funk, and sits in her bra.

Toya decides to take off her shirt, too, using it to wipe off the sheen of sweat on her shoulders and chest. “I wish we had some water.”

Sara goes back to When We Came Together. A few lines into a section on visual artists, she comes across a mention of Victor Arnautoff, the artist who painted the mural at the entrance of the auditorium. She’s surprised to learn that a lithograph he made in 1955, while he was teaching at Stanford, attracted national controversy. It showed Richard Nixon carrying a paintbrush and a bucket labeled “smear,” and was intended for display at the San Francisco Art Festival, but was taken down after the curators received a phone call from the FBI. At one point, Arnautoff was even interviewed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for suspected communist sympathies, a charge that owed at least in part to his birth in Russia and his apprenticeship with Diego Rivera. Sixty-five years later, Arnautoff’s work ignited another controversy, this time after a high school mural depicting George Washington as a conqueror of Natives and enslaver of Africans was denounced as demeaning to his victims. A petition circulated to remove the painting from the high school.

Too critical of a president, then not critical enough. How an artist’s reputation changes in the course of a half century! Sara is used to historical reassessments, from the mild to the radical. When she wrote her dissertation she fashioned new arguments out of old facts, using as bonding material whatever evidence or context other scholars hadn’t considered before. Reevaluating kings, presidents, or rebel leaders chipped away at their reputations as noble statesmen and helped advance scholarship. But over the years, she has seen that process expand, with more passion and less rigor, to other public figures, from actors and musicians to athletes and journalists. And now that every moment of our lives is monitored and documented, she thinks, it happens to all of us. Everyone can have an Arnautoff moment. Worse: everyone lives in expectation of an Arnautoff moment. She’s having hers now.

The steady hum of the machines, combined with the heat, has made Toya listless. She gives up on the book and leans on the table with her head between her arms. Sara decides to let her rest while she puts in new loads of uniforms and folds the dry ones. Another hour passes.

It is almost the end of the shift when Hinton passes the laundry room on his rounds. “Jesus,” he says from the doorway, “it’s hotter than hell in here.” His voice has the effect of an alarm. They both sit up, and quickly put on their shirts.

“Thermostat doesn’t work,” Toya explains.

“That’s not an excuse to take off your shirts.”

“It’s not against the rules,” Toya replies. If anyone knows what the Madison handbook has to say about shirts, it’s Toya Jones. Her work in insurance long ago trained her to pay close attention to the fine print.

“Listen to you,” Hinton says with an amused laugh. “You know the handbook by heart?”

“We’re supposed to have our shirts on in common areas. This is a restricted area, no one can come here without authorization.”

“No one’s been here at all,” Sara adds. Instantly, she knows she has made things worse. There is something about her—is it her personality? her manners? her elocution?—that seems to rub Hinton the wrong way.

He steps inside the laundry room, and casts an appraising look around him. The floor is swept clean, the soap boxes are on the shelf, the mesh bags hang from their hooks on the wall. A pile of clean uniforms sits on the folding table. Then his gaze settles on Sara, sitting with her book open in front of her. “So you’re saying I’m no one?”

“I— No. I just meant, we didn’t break any rules.”

“Here’s a rule: No one needs to see your flat rack. It’s disgusting.”

Sara drops her gaze to the floor.

But then Hinton picks up a fresh shirt from the pile. It’s still warm from the dryer. “Put this on, too,” he tells Sara.

She glances at Toya. What’s this all about, she wants to ask.

“What are you looking at her for? She can’t help you.”

Sara draws a breath, she’s about to ask why she’s being told to put on a second shirt. But there is no why, she realizes, and the last thing she needs is to get in Hinton’s crosshairs. So she takes the second shirt from him and pulls it on, though she has trouble fitting it over her own, it feels suffocating.

“Keep going,” he says, handing her another shirt.

This time the shirt gets stuck around her midriff. Her face turns hot, her hair comes undone, her arms look like flippers.

“Atta girl.” Hinton leaves, keys rattling on his belt.

After his footsteps recede down the hallway, Toya helps Sara get out of the makeshift straitjacket. “At least he didn’t write you up,” she says consolingly.

By the time they’re done pulling off the extra shirts, Sara has bruises on her arms. Her face is slick with sweat, more from rage now than heat. No matter how many times she’s had interactions like this, she can’t temper the fury they stir in her. She has to do what she’s told, even if what she’s told is subject to change without notice.

Hinton likes to say that Madison is not a jail, but he acts as if she must have done something to be sent here. Every deviation from perfect conduct confirms his suspicions about her secret, violent nature. If she protests that she’s been a victim of discrimination, he points to the algorithm, which treats people as an anonymous collection of data points and cannot be accused of fault or bias. The algorithm is objective. It doesn’t know who you are or what you look like, he’ll say, it scores everyone using the same metrics.

But for all this insistence on the fairness of the algorithm, Sara is pretty sure that what really landed her at Madison were her insolent remarks to Moss and Segura, who felt disrespected and wanted to teach her a lesson.

What has retention taught her these last few months?

That the whole world can shrink to a room.

That time is the god of all things.

That the rules don’t have to make sense.

That no matter how unjust the system is, she is expected to submit to it in order to prove that she deserves to be free of its control.

—

Sara finds Marcela on a patch of grass in the exercise yard, bent in a triangle pose. She’s devoted to her yoga practice, makes time for it even when she’s on double shifts or when the temperature is in the high eighties, like it is this afternoon. The other retainees have retreated to the shade of the breezeway, except for Eisley Richardson, who’s doing sit-ups a few feet away, counting her reps out loud.

“You still want help with your petition?” Sara asks.

Slowly rising out of the yoga pose, Marcela stands arms akimbo, blinking at Sara. It takes her a moment to register the question. “But you said—”

“—I’ll do it.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

The library is busy, but after waiting an hour, Sara gets a seat at one of the computer stations, with Marcela standing beside her. As Sara types, she learns that Marcela DeLeón was born in Bell Gardens to a pair of schoolteachers who sat her in front of Sesame Street reruns while they graded papers. When she turned four, she asked for a violin—just like Elmo’s. Music was at once a passion and a revelation. By the time she finished high school, she was playing backyard parties and writing her own songs.

“That’s good,” Marcela says.

“That’s only the intro,” Sara replies. “Now we have to explain why you must have your instrument, and why you must have it now.” Before her retention, Marcela used to play the guitar for seven or eight hours a day, so she’s lost hundreds of hours of practice. Since she’s been at Madison, she’s missed Sharp Jello’s spring and summer tours, along with her share of merch sales and an appearance fee at a popular festival in Oregon. The band ended up using a different guitarist, and that guy is going to be with them when they start recording their new album next month. Even if Marcela were released right now and by some miracle was able to get her spot back, it would take her a long time to catch up, write new songs, and be ready in time for the band’s next tour. If she can’t tour, she can’t make a living. Having her instrument back is the only way for her to maintain her skills and be ready to rejoin the band and support herself when she is released.

“You think they’ll agree?” Marcela asks.

“It’s worth a try.” Sara also adds a paragraph about how music reduces stress, promotes brain function, and improves sleep. Isn’t sleep why they are here, after all? It’s practically in the interest of Safe-X to give Marcela her instrument; they’ll get more data out of her in the end. Studies have shown, Sara writes with the confidence of someone who knows that studies can be found to support almost any claim, that listening to music before going to bed results in better and longer sleep. “There. That might work.”

“Thanks,” Marcela says. “I appreciate it.” She saves the document to her Safe-X account. “I’m gonna go ask for clearance to send it right now.”

“There’s no rush,” Sara replies. Petition reviews can take weeks. It took Alice nearly four months to get her headwrap returned to her.

They walk out of the library together, the petition having established a bond of sorts between them. Marcela is in a chatty mood. She tells Sara that she appreciates her help, that it’s good to know there are decent people at Madison, that some women aren’t as innocent as they portray themselves to be.

The obscure hints confuse Sara. “Spit it out,” she says. “Who do you mean?”

“Lucy Everett.”

“But you’re friends with her, right? What happened?”

“We’re roommates,” Marcela corrects. “I thought she was a nice old lady. Turns out, she’s a scammer.” The accusation is hard to reconcile with Lucy, a widow who likes to entertain everyone at mealtimes with her stories of the Los Angeles she knew as a young girl and who can be depended upon to brighten the mood when someone is feeling down. “I know how it sounds,” Marcela says, noticing the disbelief on Sara’s face, “but it’s true. Lucy stole names and Social Security numbers from the real estate company she worked for, then opened new lines of credit.”

“You sure about this?”

“Positive. She was clever about it, too, didn’t start using the names and numbers until after she quit that job and started working for another company in Sherman Oaks. So it took the police a while to catch up to her. But then she got into that car accident and the case dragged on while she was in the hospital. Then I guess the prosecutor dropped charges against her.”

“But how do you know she did all this?”

“Because she’s getting sued by one of her victims.”

“No, I mean how did you find out?”

“What happened was, she left her paperwork on her cot when she went to show Eisley where the comm pods are. Usually, she puts everything away on her shelf, but I guess she was so eager to make friends with the new girl, she got careless. I thought the paperwork was a petition of some kind, so I snuck a peek, just to see how it looked, you know, because I had to write one. Turns out, it was mail from her lawyer.”

No matter how often it happens, it always comes as a surprise to discover that people are more than their public selves, that they have private entanglements we know nothing about. But why tell Sara about Lucy’s legal troubles? Sara isn’t a prosecutor, there’s nothing she can do about them. Nor is she a victim of whatever scheme Lucy was supposedly running. So what good does it do, in the end, to share all this with her? “All right,” she tells Marcela when they get to the stairs. “I’ll see you later, yeah?”

Marcela stops mid-stride. “Right. I’m gonna go get clearance for my petition. Thanks.”

Sara climbs the stairs to her room, finding it mercifully empty; she’s had enough chatter for the day. The late afternoon light is lengthening the shadows on the floor and the heat is starting to rise. She tries to read, but her mind is restless. The revelation about Lucy is forcing her once again to unspool the chain of events that led to her retention. Maybe her dreams became suspicious because of an infraction she has forgotten about or dismissed as unimportant. Emily has that prison sentence she served as a teenager. Marcela has a restraining order against her. And now it turns out Lucy is involved in a civil suit.

But Sara doesn’t have anything like this on her record. Up until Officer Moss hauled her away, the last Friday before Christmas was just an ordinary day, filled with tedious obligations, small pleasures, minor setbacks and frustrations. If there is indeed some suspicious activity on her record, it must date back further than that. At Toya’s hearing, the agents pulled out emails dating back twenty years. That is a long time to go fishing in someone’s past, looking for words or actions that can be given new meanings. Sara has no idea what they might find in her own records if they looked that far back.

Then she feels it coming—the moment she spends so much of her time evading. The pain of missing her old life starts like a knife in the stomach and spreads from there to every part of her body. If only Elias wrote to her, she would have his words to live on, or live for, and freedom wouldn’t seem so remote as it does now. But her birthday has come and gone, and she still hasn’t heard from him. Is he starting to believe the lies they’re telling about her?

The last time they spoke on the phone, he’d sounded relieved that a new speech therapist had been hired at the office, because it would lessen the pressure on his schedule. Maybe he’s been busy with what’s-her-name. Maybe they’re together right now. Jealousy jabs her in the chest. Stop that, she tells herself. Stop it right now. She focuses on her breath, though the stifling heat makes it difficult. All she can do is sit with the pain, let her body absorb it, wait for it to subside long enough for her to be able to move again.