Page 24 of The Dream Hotel

T he lights turn on, the fire horn blares. Sara sits up, dazed and frightened all at once. She waits for an evacuation order from the chief retention officer, or some kind of safety announcement, but neither comes. Is it a false alarm? No, the lights have stayed on and, beneath the mustiness that clings to the walls and the smell of sweat and sleep, there’s a whiff of smoke. The last two wildfires that swept through this part of the state didn’t trigger the sirens, though the sky grayed with ash and smoke for days. This one must be close. Sara pushes the covers aside.

Emily is already at the window, with her face to the glass pane and her hands cupped around her eyes. Outside, the wind is an angry, drawn-out howl. “It’s blowing west,” she says. “But it’s still dark out, I can’t make out much.”

If Emily is right about the wind, then the smoke will reach Sara’s husband and children soon, if it hasn’t already. Years ago, Elias fell into the maddening habit of silencing his devices at night before plugging them in in the kitchen, so he might not receive the phone alerts until he wakes in the morning, might not check that all the windows in the house are properly sealed, turn on the air purifiers, and pack an evacuation bag.

From the hallway comes the hum of conversations—wild guesses about the direction of the blaze, mixed in with stories about past fires. After a while a consensus seems to build: if this fire really posed a serious threat, the CRO would have ordered an evacuation. “What do you think?” Sara asks her roommate. “Are we in any danger?”

“Depends on the speed of the wind.” Emily sucks her teeth. “Plus the temperature, the humidity level, the kind of crews they’re using, things like that. But if the siren got triggered, it’s not looking good.”

They stand at the window together, watching the sky lighten from charcoal to ash.

A few minutes later, the bell for device check rings. Hinton comes through the gate in a mask. And not a cheap one, either—a high-quality respirator that he must have kept in his locker downstairs, saving it for a day just like this. It squashes the lower part of his face and makes his eyes look wider, as if caught in a moment of surprise. He rushes through the neuroprosthetic scan and ends up having to go back and re-scan one of the retainees in 204. When he finally gets to 208, Emily blasts him with questions. “So where did the fire start?”

“Is it a surface fire, or more like crown?”

“What percent contained?”

“Are they calling up the state crews?”

The scanner beeps, and Hinton moves to Sara.

“Are you evacuating us?” she asks.

He fixes his surprised eyes on her. Though the mask hides the lower part of his face, it seems from the crinkles on his temples that he might be smiling. What’s so funny about this situation? If they’re marooned here, so is he. But before she can ask him anything else, he goes across the way to 209.

Sara returns to her room. In all the time she’s been at Madison, she’s never seen Hinton rushing through device check like this. It’s his favorite part of the job: the moment when the women stand at attention while he holds the scanner that gives them credit for a night of compliance. Maybe what she took to be a smirk is only his way of hiding his fear. Maybe there’s some truth to the stories about the burn scar on his neck, the lost home, the dead German shepherd. She makes her cot, tugging at the pilling blanket, while across the room Emily fumes. “Why bother with the siren?” she says, her voice brimming with indignation. “What’s the point of a siren if there’s no evacuation?”

“For the attendants.”

“I figured. Ever heard of a rhetorical question?”

Emily has been irritable ever since she was pulled off breakfast duty and placed on custodial services, which she hates. This morning she’s especially irate, ranting about poor emergency training and missed fire drills, lapses she took it upon herself to bring to the CRO’s attention in an email at the start of the summer. The response she received seconds later informed her that Safe-X is in compliance with all of the state’s safety protocols and emergency procedures.

When Sara returns to the window, Emily looks up from her cot. “See anything?”

“Not much.” The sky has lightened to orange. The jackrabbits that live on the mountain seem to have fled, and the only movement comes from the bushes swaying in the hot wind. Beyond the hill, the horizon is a line of red. Sara waits for a few minutes, but the bus isn’t running this morning. The old woman must’ve called on family or friends and made plans for a possible evacuation, but here at Madison the retainees are entirely at the mercy of Safe-X. Sara’s thoughts flit back to her family. She has to talk to Elias, she has to find out if he and the twins are safe.

Promptly at 6:30 she walks to the PostPal comm pods downstairs. She counts thirty-seven women ahead of her in the line; it might be hours before her turn comes. She sits with her back to the wall, wraps her arms around her knees and closes her eyes. A few minutes later she hears the jingle of keys, and Hinton appears at the corner. He tells the women to disperse, but the mask muffles his voice and the retainees pretend not to understand his orders. For a moment he surveys the line, then walks into the PostPal office.

The news is carried from mouth to ear until it reaches Sara: Hinton has ordered the comm pods closed for the day. “The whole day?” she asks in disbelief, stepping out of the line and craning her neck to look. Sure enough, the overhead lights in the glass booths are being shut off one by one. The women whose calls have been interrupted step out into the hallway.

“All day,” Alice confirms. She was five spots ahead of Sara. Now she’s closed the book she was reading and is holding it to her chest as if for comfort.

“Can he do that?” Sara’s left leg has fallen asleep. She rubs it with one hand while with the other she steadies herself against the wall. “I mean, they’re a separate company, aren’t they? He doesn’t work for them.”

“I have no idea what just happened.”

“Has he ever closed PostPal booths before?”

Alice chews on her lower lip. “He closed them once last year, I think it was in November, but it was only for an hour or two because the PostPal guys were here to fix something. He’s never shut them down for a day, and definitely not on a day like this.”

Sara walks up to the PostPal office entrance, where some of the women have gathered, trying to find out what happened or asking for a refund of their interrupted calls. No rule has been broken, they argue, so why are the pods being closed today? Because communication is a privilege, the attendant on duty replies, and privileges can be taken away at any moment. The grumbling continues until Hinton steps out of the office. From the back of the crowd someone calls out, “Thanks a lot, asshole.”

Hinton pulls his mask down to his chin. “Who said that?”

No one answers. The women disperse quickly, before he gets the urge to point his Tekmerion at one of them. He stares at one of the domes on the ceiling, as if willing it to speak the name of the woman who cussed him out, then adjusts his mask over his nose. He’ll have to go to the observation deck to review the footage.

“I need to check on my kids,” Sara says as he walks past her.

“Not my problem.”

“Wait.” A shiver of discomfort runs down her back when he turns to look at her. There is something deeply unsettling about his eyes, which never seem to blink or waver, but remain fixed on their target with military precision.

“What is it?”

“They’re gonna know you’re shutting down their booths.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I’m just saying, there’s a wildfire. They’re probably expecting a higher call volume on a day like this.” She searches his face for a reaction, but even with the mask she can tell he’s untroubled. “I wonder what’ll happen when they notice that their pods have been shut off.”

“Nothing,” he says with a chuckle. “Nothing’ll happen. You think anyone at PostPal cares what goes on in here? They have hundreds of facilities, most of them bigger and more profitable than this one.”

She tries to swallow, but saliva sits in her throat like chalk. “They’ll notice the shutoff, is what I’m saying.”

“Not a shutoff, an outage. Outages happen.” He shifts on his feet. “Look,” he says, his tone suddenly serious. “I can’t have the hallways packed with people. It’s not safe, not today.”

She doesn’t want to beg—and yet. “Please. I just want to check on my family. Please.”

“And I want to be somewhere else.” He tilts his head. “But we don’t always get what we want. Such is the nature of life.”

As if their situations were the same. As if he were separated from his children, kept in the dark about his family’s well-being, prevented from using the phone in the middle of a wildfire. But never mind moral principle or basic fairness: even by appealing purely to his self-interest, she can’t convince him to keep the booths open. She presses her lips together, holding back from screaming all the ugly words that come readily to her.

—

At breakfast Sara can’t bring herself to eat, though it is a Friday and scrambled eggs and fried potatoes are on the menu. The light streaming in from the windows bathes the cafeteria in orange tones, coppering the faces of everyone around her. The heat is stifling; it feels as if they’re sitting in an oven. Marcela coughs into her elbow, then takes a long sip of tea to tamp down the urge.

Emily arrives with her tray. “The fire started yesterday near Lake Perris. But it spread real fast because of the wind.”

“Lake Perris?” At least it’s far from Elias and the kids, Sara thinks. “But they’re containing it, right?”

“Nope. It’s three and a half miles away from here.”

“Jesus.”

Toya rubs her nose. “Is it just me or is the smell stronger now?”

Emily casts an appraising look on the half-empty dining room. “They should’ve had an emergency plan in place, with designated team leaders who can execute it when the time comes. They should be giving us masks, at least.”

All of a sudden the lights go out. The hum of the service station, the hiss of the refrigerator, the whirr of the cameras—all these stop at once, too. Whether the shutdown is a preemptive measure by the state or a sign that the fire has damaged the power grid, Sara has no idea. She watches as Hinton goes to the door, pokes his head in the darkened hallway, then after a moment returns to his phone, this time holding it up to find a working signal.

“I asked about masks at the infirmary,” Marcela says after a minute, before being overtaken by another fit of coughing. Flores runs the infirmary, where under ordinary circumstances the women can get pads or tampons at no expense if they agree to have their periods tracked. “She said she didn’t have any for retainees.”

“I can make masks for all of us,” Sara whispers. “I can use my sheets to make masks for all of us.”

Silence falls on the table. An entire section of the Safe-X handbook is devoted to prohibitions against destruction of company property, and the corresponding punishments for each offense. In the kitchen, a retainee is still washing meal trays at the sink, the clattering getting louder and more aggressive as the pile beside her rises.

Marcela asks, her tone straining to be hypothetical, “Where would you get scissors?”

“I’ll find something,” Sara says.

“In the laundry room?”

“We don’t have any tools there. But I’ll figure something out.”

Williams rushes into the cafeteria just then, his shoes squeaking on the vinyl floors. He brings some kind of news to Hinton, who listens with his head cocked to the side and his hand cupped behind one ear. The two men continue their palaver at the window, looking worriedly at the orange sky. Williams is about to leave when Hinton calls him back and makes him adjust his mask snugly over his nose. It’s an oddly protective gesture, coming from Hinton.

And still no announcement from the CRO.

“We’re fucked,” Emily says.

“No. I’m going to make masks for all of us,” Sara says again. Sensing that the other women agree, or at least that they do not disagree, she shares the idea that came to her when she sat down and found a thick layer of ash on the table. We are wasting our time waiting for help, she says. It might never come, or it might come too late, which amounts to the same thing. Have you noticed that the construction workers aren’t here this morning, she asks. They must’ve been held back from work today, which means we are close enough to the fire that it isn’t safe for them. If it isn’t safe for them, how can it be safe for us? We have to make face masks to protect ourselves against exposure, just like the attendants. And then, she says, lowering her voice even further, we need to go down to Receiving and take control of one of the service trucks. We have to get out of here.

“Count me out,” Toya says.

Of all the objections to her proposal, Sara hasn’t anticipated that the first, and the swiftest, would come from her closest friend at Madison. It’s a dangerous plan, yes, but they themselves are in danger. If they’re not evacuated, they’ll burn to death, and that’s if the carbon monoxide doesn’t kill them first. “But why? You want to just sit here and wait?”

“Do you know how many rules you’d be breaking? What the attendants will do when you get caught? When, by the way, not if. Even if you leave this place without getting caught, you’ll head into the city without papers, without food, without money. When you’re clear of the fire, you’ll part ways with the others. You’ll want to go home, to your husband and children, and they’ll be waiting for you there.” All of this Toya says dispassionately, as though she were outlining to a customer all the reasons why his insurance claim is being denied. “If you leave Madison, you won’t be going to another retention center, you’ll be going to prison.”

“This is a prison.”

“No, it’s not.” Technically, retainees have more rights than prisoners. They can vote in local, state, and national elections, even if the unpredictable length of their confinement means that most don’t bother changing their voter registrations, if they’re registered at all. They can also conduct limited banking transactions, a privilege that comes down to being able to charge commissary items or various PostPal services to their families’ credit cards. The finer distinctions between jails, prisons, public safety centers, commitment clinics, and retention facilities seem to matter a great deal to Toya all of a sudden. “It’s not a prison.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Who cares about the difference,” Emily puts in, “if we’re all gonna be burned alive?”

“That’s right.” Sara turns to Alice. “What about you? Can you help us get out of here? I bet you’d know how to jump-start one of the trucks in Receiving.”

Alice raises her palms. “I never said I broke into trucks.”

“I’m asking if you can, not if you did. Can you jump-start one or not?”

“What’s going on with you?” Toya asks, putting a concerned hand on Sara’s arm.

Sara shrugs. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Listen to me,” Toya says. “Right now, we’re a problem for them. If we leave, they become a problem for us.”

“Suit yourself. But I’m not going to sit here and wait to be killed.”

Marcela has another coughing fit, and Alice has to give her some of her own tea to wash it down. Across the cafeteria a table of younger retainees erupts in a loud argument, with Victoria getting up in a huff and moving to another spot; Hinton notices the brouhaha, but instead of going over to investigate, he walks out of the cafeteria altogether.

“I can get you a blade,” Emily says. “For the masks.”

Another surprise. Emily is the only one in the group with a criminal record, which lengthens the extensions she receives whenever she is written up. She has the most to lose from breaking out; yet she’s the only one willing to act. “That would be great,” Sara replies. “Anyone have commissary credits? We’ll need to buy bottled water.”

Toya, Alice, and Marcela look down at their food.

“I guess it’s just you and me, then,” Sara tells Emily.

She picks up her tray and heads to the busing station. Never before has she wanted more keenly to get away from this place, with its crushing indifference, its petty and ever-shifting rules.

—

The commissary is sold out of snacks, bottled water, and batteries. With the credits she has left on her account Sara buys what liquids are left—a canned fizzy drink and an apple juice—and waits while the clerk tallies her balance with a hand calculator. I should’ve gone to the store before breakfast, she reproaches herself, I shouldn’t have delayed. Walking away with her purchases she notices that a few retainees are clustered in small groups at the windows to the exercise yard. On the other side of the smudged glass, a Safe-X agent stands with his hand shielding his face from the orange glare of the sun, eyeing the sky as if he could divine the future.

Back in their room Sara finds Emily working on a disposable razor with her tweezers. The razor has a pivoting head, so she has to steady it against the mattress while she pulls at the metal staple that holds the cartridge in place, but after a half dozen tries the staple comes off. She taps lightly on the handle, and three shiny blades drop onto the blanket. “There,” she says. “Take one.”

With the blade Sara cuts a square piece of fabric from her sheet. She places a strip of toilet paper across the middle, folds the fabric over it, and loops a rubber hairband around either end. “How’s this?” she asks as she fits Emily with the mask. “Good? Can you breathe?”

“Kind of.”

“Do you smell smoke?”

“Not so much,” Emily concedes.

“Then it’s working.” Sara quickly makes a second face covering and puts it on, adjusting the straps until it fits snugly. The reflection that meets her in the mirror reminds her of the pandemic of her childhood. Unlike some of her classmates in school she never minded wearing masks: they concealed her bouts of acne, the rage she felt whenever a boy told her she needed to smile more, her impatience with strangers who asked, “So what are you?” She couldn’t have known that the skill would come in handy so many years later.

Sara stands at the window again. The sky is a bright orange, and the cloud of smoke has edged closer—she can see only twenty feet past the bus stop on the highway. “Look,” she says, pointing outside. “It’s getting worse.”

“If they don’t get us out right now, we won’t be able to make it. I can’t believe the CRO is AWOL on a day like this. And Hinton’s disappeared, too.”

“You still want to do this, right?”

Emily gives a quick nod. Her comic books and pictures are already packed in her pillowcase. “The Receiving gate isn’t a good idea,” she tells Sara. “It’s crawling with attendants. We should get out from the kitchen. There’s a door in the back that leads to the lot where they park their cars.”

“All right.” Sara bundles her journal and the drinks she bought into her pillowcase.

It is a short walk downstairs. Mercifully the hallways are busy, the power shutoff having relieved retainees of their trailer duties for the day, and no one pays them much attention. Blending with the traffic they make their way to the cafeteria, now empty of diners. “This way,” Emily says, leading Sara past the service window. She enters a key code at the kitchen door and a moment later they are inside, standing before the magic door.

Which requires another key code.

Now what?

Emily tries the same code she used a moment earlier, but the light flashes red. She runs her index finger on the keypad and, though it’s clear that the numbers 2, 5, 8, and 0 have been pressed a hundred times, there’s no guessing what the correct permutation might be.

Sara’s eyes sting; the smell of smoke is stronger by the door than anywhere else in the building. This is no time for codes. She runs back to the kitchen to look for a metal spatula or a can opener, but all the drawers are locked. The stainless steel countertop is bare, the dishwashing station empty. Is there a toolbox in the walk-in cooler? She steps inside—and finds Hinton doubled over next to a stack of crates.

Their eyes meet, though she isn’t sure he fully registers her presence because he’s having so much trouble breathing. A pained wheeze escapes from his throat. His face is red, his neck has retreated into his shoulders.

He’s having a panic attack, Sara realizes.

She takes a step toward him. It would be easier for him to breathe if he took off his mask, but she doesn’t dare touch him and in any case he’s already looking away from her as if in shame, facing the boxes of dehydrated eggs as he struggles to take in as much air as his lungs will allow. The wheezing dies—he’s stopped breathing altogether. His hand flies to his holster, out of instinct it seems. Doesn’t he realize that the heavy gear on his belt is a greater danger to him at this moment than she will ever be? All she wants is to leave this place.

She runs back out to the kitchen, and grabs the only movable item she can find: one of the meal trays from the service station. It will have to do. Back at the door, she starts hacking at the keypad with it, but the lock just won’t break.

“Leave it,” Emily says after a minute. “Leave it. Let’s just go to Receiving.”

They cross the empty cafeteria again and come out into the hallway, where the screens that display work assignments are black. As they turn the corner, they bump straight into Yee, who’s carrying gallon-size containers of water in each arm. It takes him a second to regain his balance. “We’re not meeting in the cafeteria,” he tells them, his voice distorted by his N95. He’s put on a neon yellow vest over his uniform; an orange whistle dangles from his neck. “Go to the auditorium.”

“Now? We’re evacuating?”

“I need everyone in the assembly area, ready to leave. If you see any other residents, tell them to meet us there.”

Turning the corner the two make their way to the main hall, where they find dozens of retainees, some standing in groups, others sitting on the floor, waiting under the Arnautoff mural. A couple are wearing masks fashioned out of paper towels or sanitary pads. But no one seems to know when the buses will get there.

The heat continues to rise as more retainees pour into the hall. Feeling light-headed, Sara opens the fizzy drink and sips from it while gazing at the Arnautoff mural. The green lettuce seems exotically lush this morning, and the earth a rich, damp brown. It’s a bucolic scene that always manages to make her nostalgic for a past she’s never known, a time that seems more innocent than the present. But as the laborers kneel in the furrows, they’re watched by the foreman in blue dungarees, and later by the artist in his studio, and later yet by her, the process transforming them from people into objects.

Maybe past and present aren’t all that different, she thinks. The strange thing—the amazing thing, really—is that we’ve managed to find work-arounds to surveillance: we speak in whispers, look for camera blind spots, pass contraband through toilets or showers, even as we know that breaking the rules may lengthen our confinement.

And I have broken the biggest rule of all, she realizes: trying to escape this place.

Meanwhile, retainees have continued to trickle into the main hall. Victoria is the last one to arrive; she finds a spot next to Alice. The air is electric, charged with impatience. How much longer must they wait? Is the evacuation happening or not? The attendants are running around, the power outage having rendered their Tekmerions useless. One of them has gone to the office to get a current list of retainees, another is looking for a manual counter.

The distant drone of vehicles brings people to their feet, and a few minutes later Ortega appears with a bullhorn. “We’ll be evacuating to Victorville,” he announces. “You must report to the exercise yard, where you’ll be checked and led in groups of forty-two to the buses. Do not bring any personal items with you. I repeat, do not bring personal items with you. Your medications have to be packed in clear plastic bags. Proceed in two neat lines toward the yard.”

An immediate and frenzied rush follows this announcement. Sara walks, half carried by the crowd, and elbowed and kicked along the way, to the exercise yard. White ash blankets the grass like snow, and the trailers’ doors rattle in the hot wind. Beyond the chain-link fence a giant cloud of smoke sits on the horizon.

Hinton and Williams wait by the first bus, with zip ties dangling from their belts.