Page 19 of The Dream Hotel

T wo weeks have passed since the Santa Anas blew in from the canyons, but the sky still has a grayish cast. The wildflowers on the hillside droop, the bus sign is coated in dust. Sara stands at the window, waiting. At the usual time the old woman appears, lumbering up the street with her wares, but dressed today in a turquoise blue dress, with an embroidered bodice and a full skirt lined with ruffles. Sometimes she seems like the only evidence Sara has that the free world still exists, in all its capacity for beauty. Once the bus arrives, the old woman gets on, puts her bags on the luggage rack, and takes a seat. Then she raises her eyes and now she’s looking right at the window. She waves.

Her heart skipping a beat, Sara waves back. The moment lasts no more than a second or two, but it’s the best thing that’s happened to her in days, this passing glance from someone outside.

Now she sits down with her journal. She remembers only one dream from the night before, an unusually long one that unfolds in minute detail as soon as she begins writing it. She is in a fancy hotel on the Italian Riviera, waiting for the clerk at the front desk to check availability for a room. Mi dispiace, he says, the system keeps logging him out. Scuse, it will just be another minute. She waits and waits and waits. Wouldn’t it be easier if she booked the room herself? She pulls out her phone and opens a hotel app, but in a singsong voice the clerk finally announces that he has made a reservation under Sara’s name for a room with a view of the Ligurian Sea. She thanks him and hurries out of the lobby, eager to move on with her day. Outside, she finds her mother waiting for her, looking just as she did when Sara was a child: petite, limber, with jet-black hair and striking, kohl-lined eyes.

“Mama, you made it!” Sara gives her mother a tight hug. “See, this place isn’t as remote as you thought it was. You can get here in four hours.”

But with only a glance at the fancy hotel, Faiza’s face darkens. “We shouldn’t stay here. Can we go somewhere else?”

“Okay. Sure.”

Sara goes back to the front desk, where the clerk is snacking on baby carrots while watching television. As soon as she tells him that she needs to check out early, his demeanor changes. He slams a wrinkled dollar bill on the counter and tells her that this is the only refund he can offer. His courtesy is gone, he is businesslike.

“But the agreement says the room is fully refundable.” She pulls out her phone to show him the confirmation email he himself sent her a few minutes earlier. “And for any reason.”

The clerk smiles, revealing teeth yellowed by coffee. A sliver of carrot is stuck between his front teeth. “That’s not what the agreement means.”

For a long time she tries to reason with him: she reads aloud the line that says she can cancel one or more nights if she notifies the hotel by noon, then points to the clock on the wall. But he refuses to budge. “There’s no refund on this reservation.”

“Stop gaslighting me.” When he ignores her again, she grabs him by the collar and shoves the phone in his face. “Just read what it says.”

His glasses fall on the counter; he backs away from her.

Then the dream ends.

It isn’t unusual for Sara’s mother to visit her in dreams, though it’s happened with less frequency as the years have passed since her death. Still, many details in the story are incongruous. Sara has never been to the Italian Riviera, for example. She doesn’t rely on hotel clerks for reservations. And Italy is more than twelve hours away, not four. Unless, of course, they were traveling from Morocco rather than California. In her dream, Sara returned her mother to her home country, which wasn’t possible when she died because she got so sick so fast that they were overtaken by events and had to inter her at Rose Hills. Sara never recovered from the loss, which was all the more painful because it happened only months before the FDA approved the lung cancer vaccine. She misses her mother so much.

Maybe this dream is part fantasy, part fear. The fantasy is that Sara got to see Faiza again. Sara was closer to her mother than she ever was to her father, who wrapped himself in resentful silence the summer she turned nine. That year, the Millers bought a new house with a huge backyard, where they often threw parties, often at the last moment. One day in May, they invited the Husseins over for a barbecue to celebrate their eldest daughter’s admission to Georgetown. Faiza couldn’t go; she was nursing a migraine. Omar said he was on a deadline for a grant proposal, but he agreed to drop the children off on his way to the lab. “Watch out for your brother,” he told Sara.

The new house was huge. A dozen blue and gray balloons hung from the ceiling, untethered from the arrangement at the entrance, and on every table bouquets were wilting in the heat. Lamb kebabs sizzled on the grill. There was music, too, the adults were dancing and drinking on the terrace. The younger kids swam in the pool and as usual Zach played rough, dunking Sara into the water and holding her down until her lungs burned. She came up, panting for air, blinking in the glare of sunlight. “Stop it!” she pleaded. In a stinging betrayal, Sa?d started to imitate Zach, aiming for her the next time he jumped into the water. She was relieved when one of the parents told them to get out of the pool and play hide-and-seek instead.

Sara ran to the hallway closet. Sa?d tried to get in with her, but she kicked him out. “Go find your own hiding place,” she told him with not a little satisfaction, closing the door slowly so it wouldn’t creak. For a long time she sat quietly, the coats and jackets above her reeking of cigarettes and perfume, now and then pinching her nose to avert a sneeze. When she heard Zach calling her name from the terrace, she was reluctant to come out, thinking it another one of his tricks. Time passed. She was starting to doze off when Aunt Hiba’s screaming drew her out of the closet.

This is the moment when her memory becomes jumbled and she isn’t sure if she’s remembering what she herself witnessed, or what she was told later, by the grown-ups. Her uncle was in the pool in his clothes, carrying Sa?d out of the water. Someone yelled, “Call 9-1-1!” Kneeling on the cement, her uncle pressed his big hands on Sa?d’s chest, counting, counting, counting, then breathed into his mouth. All of a sudden the terrace felt crowded, and the music stopped. But what Sara does remember, with a clarity as hard and cutting as a diamond, is the voice inside her that said You should’ve let him hide in the closet with you.

The guests parted to let the paramedics through with a gurney. They, too, tried to revive her younger brother, and failed. The police investigators said that Sa?d must’ve been hiding in the pink flamingo float at the edge of the pool. That he must’ve lost his balance when he tried to get out. That he’d hit his head on the cement ledge and sank in the water. That no one had heard him because of the music.

Afterwards, Sara’s father became a different man. A stranger who lived in their house. He didn’t know how to cope with the loss, Sara can see that now, but his prolonged silence seemed colored by unspoken blame toward her. He started spending all his time at Caltech. When he came home, he would go straight into his bedroom, his eyes passing over her without a flicker of interest, and emerge a few minutes later, having changed into his qashaba. Then he would disappear into his office for the rest of the evening. Sara couldn’t watch television or listen to music when he was working, which was all the time. The smallest interruption could set him off. He would complain that he was behind on all his deadlines, that he needed peace and quiet to finish, that no one in this house understood him. How often Sara dissolved into tears at his outbursts!

Over time, she learned not to involve him in her life. It was to her mother that she went for help with her science project, or to report that her English teacher leered at girls in class, or to get cheered up when she didn’t score a goal during the entire soccer season of her junior year. Years passed before Omar crawled up from the abyss of grief, and by then Sara’s relationship with him had become tainted. She let him dote on Mona and Mohsin, of course, but she couldn’t quite close the distance that had opened between them after Sa?d died.

As she writes, Sara realizes how much she still misses her mother. Had she only known how little time she had with Faiza, she’d have sat with her on the porch every afternoon that last summer. Faiza would sit just so, under the shade of the magnolia tree, a cigarette in one hand and her phone in the other, reading the news from home. Before moving to the United States, she had worked as a reporter for a popular magazine in Morocco, filing increasingly alarming reports about state corruption. Once, she exposed a government minister who was diverting medical equipment meant for rural hospitals to his private clinic. The story went viral, leading to a reader tip for another investigation, this one into a car-assembly plant that received subsidies to educate workers, but used the money for executive bonuses instead. Almost overnight, the DGSN became interested in her. They tailed her when she was running errands, tapped her phone, sent undercover agents to dinner parties she attended. It became impossible to find interview subjects who were willing to speak candidly to her or to travel without harassment from police officers who’d been alerted about her plans. And then she met Omar—an EMI-trained physicist who had recently landed a fellowship in California.

After she moved to Los Angeles, Faiza continued to keep up with stories from home, the ashtray by her side filling up as the afternoon hours passed. When she talked about a piece of news, the history she unraveled turned out almost always to be messier or more troubled than the article made it seem. Perhaps that is where Sara’s interest in history began, on the porch where her mother smoked cigarettes, lost in memories of the people she knew in another country. This is the picture Sara always conjures when she thinks of her mother: a woman tethered to her past. Even in the dream, she returned to it.

But maybe this dream hints at Sara’s fear that she is stuck at Madison, just as she’s stuck in that hotel on the Italian Riviera. Nothing she has tried has worked. It’s like the song says, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Perhaps her subconscious is chiding her; she should’ve looked more closely at the agreement she signed when she got the Dreamsaver, should’ve realized they’d commodify her dreams, sell them to whoever was willing to buy them. Sara has blamed herself for this lapse many times in her waking moments, too, but at the time she got the implant, her sleep deprivation was so acute, so debilitating, that she would’ve done anything to get some relief. No one expects a starving person to read the nutritional information on a bag of chips, so why should they expect insomniacs to read terms of service that are fifteen pages long?

Besides, even if she didn’t have the neuroprosthetic she would still not be safe from the RAA. If her car had detected signs that she’d driven under the influence, they could’ve suspended her license. If she’d engaged in financial transactions they deemed suspicious, they could’ve put holds on the kind of bank accounts she was allowed to have. If she’d interacted on social media with people they’d flagged, they could’ve prevented her from buying an airplane ticket. After all, how else are they supposed to stop crime before it happens?

—

Her mind wanders to her shadow life, the one she would still have if she hadn’t gotten the implant, hadn’t been detained at LAX on her return from London. In that life, she’s struggling to keep her eyes open while she gets the twins situated in their playpen with a set of magnetic building blocks and a few stuffed animals. The coffee maker in the kitchen beeps. She pours herself a cup and leans against the counter, sipping it as she looks out of the window at the new day. The rain from last night has left the street clean. The neighbor is walking his Lab, patiently waiting on the sidewalk as the dog sniffs the grass, his tail wagging. A woman jogs on the pavement, her face flushed and dripping with sweat, oblivious to the SUV that swerves to avoid hitting her. The leaves of the oak tree shiver when the wind picks up. As Sara finishes her coffee, the theme of Morning Edition begins to play on the stereo.

Or, scratch that. It hasn’t rained in ten months, and the leaves of the oak tree are dry and yellow. The tile on the kitchen floor feels warm under Sara’s feet. Wouldn’t it be nice to go for a swim? The neighborhood Y has an Olympic-size outdoor pool, with a couple of lanes reserved for laps, and it’s not too busy in the mornings. She might have time to make it there and back before she has to log on to the staff meeting at eleven. Just as she starts her coffee, Mohsin and Mona tussle over the blue dolphin that Elias’s parents gave them last month. They have a dozen stuffed animals in their playpen, but of course they’re fighting over that stupid dolphin, which makes a clicky sound they love. Clickity click click. Mohsin manages to grab the dolphin, but instead of walking away, he hits Mona on the head with it and she drops to the floor and lets out a bloodcurdling scream, like he’s hit her with a brick. “Hey, buddy,” Sara says, turning off NPR before the news starts. “Don’t hit your sister.”

“Construction has the highest number of fatal injuries of any industry.”

Dazed, Sara looks up from her book. She is in the rec room, seated by the window with Toya, a bag of carrot chips open between them. From upstairs in the east wing comes the sound of construction workers calling out to each other as they pack up for the day. “What?”

“Construction has the highest number of fatal injuries,” Toya repeats. “Higher than trucking or warehousing.”

“I guess that makes sense, with all the tools,” Sara says.

“But with a higher number of claims, there’s also more cases of fraud. I remember, when I was starting out, this guy filed a claim saying he’d hurt his elbow doing construction work. The paperwork seemed legit, he had all the right medical certifications and proof of missed workdays. I called his house, just to check on a small detail, and someone answers. His teenage daughter, I think. I couldn’t make out what she was saying because of the music in the background. I asked if she could turn it down, she said she couldn’t because her dad was building a tree house in the backyard and the remote control was up there with him. I mean, he could’ve at least waited until the claim was approved.” She laughs—a good hearty laugh that shows the gap between her front teeth. She’s in a better mood now that she’s finally received a replacement for her blood pressure medication.

Sara closes her book; she won’t be able to read. When Toya gets into a talkative mood, you can’t shut her up. “Did you see a lot of fraud in your time at Sanctuary?”

“Not a lot. But enough, you know.”

“Enough to…”

“Well, to make me skeptical. Most people are honest, you know, but there are always those who try to cheat the system. I learned not to take anything at face value, even if there’s documentation. First thing people do when they file fraudulent claims is attach paperwork that they think proves their lies. But as soon as I start digging, I find holes in their stories, or contradictions in the evidence, things that don’t quite fit.”

Sara picks up another carrot chip. “What makes you want to investigate, though?”

“The software pulls out suspicious cases for me, but then I look at the client profile, the size of the claim, the date when the policy was written. Like, if someone takes out a large policy, then files a claim less than twelve months later. That sort of thing. But sometimes it’s just a gut feeling that something is off.”

“You’re kidding, right? You investigate based on a gut feeling?”

“I mean, yeah, sometimes.”

A movement outside the window briefly catches Sara’s eye; an attendant has come out into the yard, pulling his phone from the back pocket of his pants. When he turns his face toward the sunlight, she sees it’s Ortega. For a moment he closes his eyes, warming his face under the sun, then turns his attention to his phone. “And you don’t see why that might be a problem?” Sara asks, returning her focus to Toya.

“My job was to investigate,” Toya replies. “I made phone calls or home visits, then decided on the claims. I didn’t punish anyone.”

“I guess,” Sara says, reluctant to concede the point. She can’t explain why she’s so bothered by what seems like a standard procedure in Toya’s profession. So what if there was no legal punishment? Making people go through a lengthy and rebarbative process based solely on a hunch isn’t fair. Some people might never follow up on their claims because of the hassle, losing money that might be owed to them. That is a kind of penalty, too.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Toya adds, “I work here now. That other life is gone.”

All at once, Sara’s irritation disappears. She tells Toya she can always go back to Sanctuary when she leaves. “You’re obviously good at what you do.”

“They weren’t happy with the union talk, so they wouldn’t want me. But even without that, they wouldn’t hire me with the hole I have on my resume. As a matter of fact, no one in actuaries would.” Toya laughs silently, shaking her head at the irony. “When I come out, I’m gonna have to go in a different line of work.”

“Maybe I will, too.”

“Yeah? What’re you thinking?”

“I’m not sure.” Sara can’t imagine that the Getty would have a position open for her when she comes out, and with a lengthy retention on her record, a teaching job is out of the question. She’ll have to find something else. All she knows is that she can’t go back to living like a bear in a nature preserve, unaware that it’s being watched from hidden cameras while it’s fishing for salmon or sunning itself on a rock. Surely, she’s more than that. She wants freedom, not a bunch of enclosed rights. “I just want to get as far away from here as I can.”

—

For once, there is no wait at the computer; Sara takes a free seat next to Victoria. The headlines still mention the corruption allegations against the congressman from Arizona, but now the coverage includes pictures of the pop star with whom he was partying in Saint-Tropez last summer. The story is making the slow transition from scandal to entertainment, which probably means that in the end he will face no consequences. The drought in Wyoming and Colorado might be coming to an end, with a heavy storm expected this week. A Japanese company has unveiled its new generation of bionic prosthetics, in an ingenious, low-cost design that will make it possible to help thousands of disabled survivors of war. Then a brief item in The Washington Post catches Sara’s eye: James Wesley, the chief administrator of the RAA, is engaged to be married.

For months, Sara has thought of this man only as the government official who claims to keep the American public safe through the application of smart algorithmic decisions. In interviews, he comes across as smart, cool, reasonable. If pushed by a dogged reporter, he might admit to a couple of problems with the current administration’s approach to risk assessment, but he never fails to promote algorithmic policing as the only sensible solution to public safety problems in a society where domestic terrorists, mass shooters, and other dangerous criminals can strike with unprecedented speed and violence. The RAA stops crime before it happens, he says. He sounds like he’s trying out slogans in preparation for a candidacy to elected office.

But Sara has never really thought of James Wesley as a man of flesh and blood, with family and friends and apparently now a fiancée. The report says the bride-to-be is from Pasadena, a detail that takes Sara by surprise. She went to the same high school Sara did, graduating three years later, though Sara doesn’t recognize her from the engagement photo in the newspaper. The happy couple must be creating a guest list by now, debating which DJ to hire, checking availability at the Huntington Gardens or the country club in La Canada. The thought fills Sara with rage against Wesley, who was an early advocate of risk-assessment algorithms and who now oversees the entire U.S. retention system. What can she do with this rage, though? Wesley isn’t here. Day by day, her case is handled by Safe-X agents, contract employees who say they’re only following the rules set down by the company.

Take Williams, for example. He looks like one of those aimless undergraduates Sara used to teach, the kind of student who sleepwalks through most of the semester, then comes to life a couple of weeks before grades are due. Right now, he’s sitting in his chair by the door, struggling to keep his eyes open. A button is missing from his uniform shirt and his hair looks unwashed: he seems to be having a rough morning.

Oh, Sara remembers rough mornings. They meant late nights out, a date with someone new, a dinner with old friends, where glasses were clinked and questionable decisions were made. She remembers staying up so late there was no time to take a shower or put on fresh clothes the next day. She had plenty of rough mornings, when she was Williams’s age. Years later, after she and Elias had the twins, she had a different kind of rough morning, which brought a different kind of pleasure. Mona’s cooing as her diaper was changed, Mohsin’s yawn as she rocked him to sleep. The way they kicked their little feet whenever she tried to wrestle them into their onesies. As she thinks of those lost moments, Sara’s rage rises inside her until it oozes like pus from a sore.

Eisley Richardson walks in, takes a seat next to Sara. Now Williams stirs into wakefulness. “Aguilar,” he calls out. “Time’s up.”

“Already?” Victoria glances at the clock above the entrance. “I came in at 7:15. I still have five minutes.” She goes back to her screen and is instantly absorbed in whatever she’s reading.

Without a word, Williams pulls out his Tekmerion. Maybe the rough night he had put him in a foul mood, or the Santa Anas are working on his nerves, or he enjoys the sadistic pleasure of denying a retainee the right to read about what is happening in the free world. Who knows? He points his camera at Victoria and waits for the system to pull up her file. Writing up a retainee every once in a while makes it clear to the rest of the women that they had better stay in line.

“What’re you doing?” Victoria calls from her seat.

Williams doesn’t answer, he’s staring at his device.

“Come on,” Victoria says. “Just look at the clock. I have five minutes left.”

“I called Time already.”

“Oh.” Victoria raises her eyebrows as if to say I must not’ve heard you. She stands up readily and walks over to Williams, smiling as she tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She’s taller than him and wearing a different uniform, but they seem to be about the same age. “I’m sorry about that. I was just reading about the Lakers, and I guess I lost track of time. It won’t happen again.”

Williams seems flustered by the pretty girl suddenly towering over him.

“I didn’t mean to cause any trouble,” Victoria continues, touching his arm. She glances back at the computer stations, as if realizing her mistake, then returns her gaze to him. “But you can cancel it, right?”

Williams sits up straighter. “All right. Just this time.”

What a performance, Sara thinks with reluctant admiration. So simple, so effective. Yet in all her time here, she has never managed it; her pride gets in the way.

—

The package arrives on a day when Sara has a double shift in Trailer D, so she doesn’t receive it until late in the evening. She tears through the clear plastic emblazoned with the PostPal logo, then through a green envelope that indicates this is a premium item for which Elias had to pay extra. When the greeting card drops onto her cot, the first thing she does is bring it to her nose. She takes a deep breath, but although she can detect the scent of paper and ink and something acrid, there’s nothing she can tether to her memory of home. Whatever familial smell may have lingered on the card, it was lost during the mail scanning and clearance process. Fingers trembling, she opens the card.

All around and over the Happy Birthday greeting, Mohsin and Mona have drawn little figures that look like tadpoles, with huge heads and sticklike arms. The drawings are in green and yellow crayons, but she can’t tell which were done by Mohsin and which by Mona. The figures seem feminine to her, though, as if the twins were prompted to draw Mama. Did they treat it like a game, completing it on the cluttered play table by the living room window, or was it more of a chore they had to finish before dinner, without understanding its purpose? The tadpoles are full of energy, with round eyes and, at least on one of them, what look like teeth. This detail makes her smile—and then tears prick her eyes; she’s missing so much while she’s stuck here.

Across the bottom of the card, Elias has managed to fit a couple of handwritten lines: We miss you so much, Sara. Get home soon. She closes the card, feeling at once elated by this small gift and disappointed by how brief the pleasure it gave her. Now she lingers on the artwork that appears on the front of the card, a reproduction of a Yayoi Kusama screen print of a butterfly. When she was pregnant, she and Elias had gone to a special exhibit at the Broad, walking through gallery rooms covered in mirrors, each reflecting polka-dotted pumpkins. Afterwards, they’d had lunch at a restaurant nearby, and then walked slowly hand in hand toward the Metro station. This, too, is a gift, she realizes: the memory of that ordinary day. It feels like salve on the wound of their argument.

On top of all this, Elias has added a little money to her commissary account, enough to buy snacks. She runs to the commissary, as giddy as a child.