Page 30 of The Dream Hotel

S he stands outside her childhood home. The magnolia tree is bare, the paint on the front beams is peeling. It is a sunny afternoon in June, yet all the lights are on in the living room. There her mother sits by the window, reading the newspaper with a magnifying glass, the oxygen tank that her oncologist recommended propped up against the coffee table. Across from her, Sa?d plays a game on his phone, swiping furiously as he chases a moving target across the screen. His cheeks are puffy and gray, and at his feet water is pooling into a puddle. The sound of a wind chime makes Sara turn around. Across the street, in a house that looks like a replica of her own, Elias sits on the porch with the twins, reading a book to them. The blooms on his magnolia tree are as big as saucers. “I really miss your mom,” he tells the kids.

The next moment she is at her desk at the Getty. Around her, cubicles have slowly emptied; she is the last one in the office. She clicks through a slideshow on her screen, making sure the order of the photographs in her exhibit is correct and proofreading each caption. One of her favorite pictures appears—B386, showing three little girls leaning against a stone wall in the village of Chauen, a suspicious gaze directed at the Spanish photographer who has pointed his camera at them. With a surge of horror Sara notices that the caption is wrong. It says the picture was taken in Martil in 1929, when it should be Chauen in 1921. It’s a good thing she caught this mix-up now; the exhibit will open in just two weeks. She logs in to the library, where she can find the correct caption in the catalogue, but no matter what search terms she uses or how long she scrolls through the archive, she cannot locate the master file. She picks up the phone to call a colleague for assistance.

The line rings and rings and turns into the morning bell.

Sara sits up, feeling worn out from the frantic search in her dream. Her imagination has once again taken her back to the moment she was retained: she’s eager to fix whatever mistake landed her at Madison, but can’t find the data point she needs to correct in order to prove her innocence. She hates these dreams, finds them stressful. On the other hand the earlier dream is just as morbid, placing her somewhere between the home of the dead and the home of the living. Usually when her mother visits her in a dream, it is a comfort. This time, it feels like a warning.

She steps into the bright hallway, where the other women are already lined up.

The gate opens with a loud buzz, and Hinton appears.

Sara never thought it possible to be relieved at the sight of this man, but that is exactly how she feels when she sees him walking down the hallway, his keys jingling with every step. Down the line he goes, taking his time with device check.

She is supposed to stand still, eyes fixed straight ahead, but instead she leans against the doorjamb and watches him. He isn’t the lean, athletic man she first laid eyes on last December; there’s an incipient stockiness to his build, the first hint of middle age. A trail of orange paint cuts across the pocket of the fleece jacket he wears over his uniform. She continues to stare openly at Hinton as he applies the scanner to Emily’s neuroprosthetic. His eyes are puffy, his skin flakes along the jawline. And are those silver roots on his sideburns? She didn’t know he dyed his hair!

The scanner beeps, Emily goes back inside.

On Hinton’s neck is a fresh tattoo of a small grizzly bear, in a design identical to the one on the state flag. The bear is supposed to represent strength and bravery, two qualities she doesn’t particularly associate with Hinton. As usual he smells like instant noodles, but beneath the food it seems to her she detects a note of alcohol.

Hinton puts the scanner to Sara’s implant. “Jesus, you stink,” he says, crinkling his nose. “I don’t know how you can stand it, it’s disgusting.”

“At least I don’t smell like cheap booze.”

Their eyes meet.

“What’d you do with my stuff?” she asks.

He whistles. “I didn’t know you were a writer.”

Whether this is a sign of admiration or contempt, she has no idea, but it’s clear he’s read her notebook. She’s spent the last week entertaining this exact possibility, so she expected to be prepared for it, yet it feels like a kick in the stomach. All those pages she wrote about the memories her dreams brought up, the hopes she nurtured, her desires and frustrations with this place—he’s read everything. She feels light-headed, has to steady herself against the doorjamb. “So you still have it,” she manages to say. “Please give it back to me. Please.”

The word please elicits an amused smile from him. “If you dream of having sex with me, all you had to do was ask.”

Though her back is turned to her room, Sara knows Emily is listening. Across the hall, at the doorway of 209, Ana and Stephanie chuckle. They’ll tell the others and, because no story resists embellishment when it travels, rumor will have her sleeping with all the attendants by the end of the day. Another abasement inflicted by Hinton.

She’s known a lot of Hintons in her life, especially in the world of museum work. Her own department, an all-women group that includes several archivists with graduate degrees and twenty years of experience, is run like a fiefdom by a man who was brought in from outside the institution three years ago. Jim Klass had a habit of making sweeping changes, and whenever he was challenged about it he would sideline the women who disagreed with him, dropping them from meetings or berating them over insignificant details when they did attend. It took Sara a while to understand that her boss loved to exercise control at work because he was so lacking in it in his private life: for years he had been involved in a lawsuit against a baby-food manufacturer that he accused of having caused his younger son’s autism. Perhaps as a result of this protracted and expensive suit, he tended to view every discussion as an argument that had to be won decisively by one party or the other. The only time he backed away from one of his faddish initiatives was when one of the women under him had leverage.

Hinton moves to leave, but Sara puts a hand on his arm. “Wait,” she says. “Why were you hiding in the walk-in refrigerator?”

He swats her hand, but the grin on his face has disappeared.

Now we’re talking.

—

With the scan finished, she rushes downstairs with Emily. There are already three people waiting outside the clothing office, even though it’s only 6:15. They join the line, Emily teasing her already, asking how long she’s had a crush on Hinton, and Sara shaking her head, saying, “Don’t even.” But it’s fine. It’s fine. She’s been fortunate in her roommate, she knows, and after so much time together she’s learned to trust her. Emily could’ve filled out several Basic-10s if she’d had the inclination, but so far she’s kept everything she’s seen or heard to herself.

The line reaches the end of the corridor by the time Victoria arrives on duty. Her hair is in a bun, but instead of the standard low knot she has braided and pinned hers into a more elaborate updo, apparently without fear that an attendant might dock her for improper grooming. On her lips she wears red lipstick, one of the most expensive items in the commissary. Sara can’t recall her wearing it before; the wine-dark color suits her, though it also makes her look older than the twenty-two years she celebrated not long ago.

With a thunderous roar, Victoria rolls up the service window.

Sara picks up her laundry bag, eager for the line to move. It is a chilly morning, but made cheerful somehow by the sound of the rain, the first of the season, which falls with great abandon on the world outside. The patter is invigorating, as if she herself were a tender plant, its leaves scorched, now opening itself up to receive sustenance.

Emily’s turn comes. Eyes fixed on Victoria, she holds out her bag. “Morning.”

“You can just put it down,” Victoria says, pointing at the counter. “Fill out the form.”

“Right. Sure.” Emily faces the screen, taps out her request, then swivels the tablet back. “I like your lipstick,” she says.

Victoria nods distractedly. She catalogues the items Emily turned in, and gets replacements. “Next.”

Sara puts her mesh bag on the counter and quickly fills out the form on the tablet before turning it over for inspection. The piles of laundry lining the back wall are short, but she is relieved to see that uniforms are still available. She will get one this morning.

Victoria makes a note that one of the sheets has been torn. “Oof. That’s gonna cost ya.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She regards Sara with new interest, but after a moment brings her fresh linens, a shirt, a pair of pants, underwear and socks. “It’s good you came early,” she says. “We’re not expecting another delivery of uniforms today.”

Sara clutches the clean clothes tightly to her chest.

“Laundry service is slower with you out,” Victoria continues. “And now Toya. What’s going on with the two of you? You came down with the quitting disease at the same time?”

Victoria has been at Madison, what, five or six months? Not quite a long hauler, but not a newbie, either. By now, she’s realizing there are only three things she can do: obey, resist, or withdraw. Everyone tries to obey the rules, in the beginning. But inevitably, even when they don’t mean to, they break one. Safe-X makes its largest share of profits not from the observation period of twenty-one days that the RAA has mandated but from the postponements it generates through its complicated disciplinary system. Intentionally resisting the rules has the same result as unintentionally breaking them—higher risk scores. But withdrawing their cooperation at least lets them exercise what power they have and strike back at the company that’s keeping them here. Victoria has been here long enough to understand that.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a disease,” Sara says, tilting her head. “It’s more like a good fever. Like when your body’s immune system is fighting a virus.” She smiles. “It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

But Victoria’s attention seems to have shifted already. “Next.”

Sara heads straight to the locker room, where she discards her dirty uniform and steps into a shower stall. Clean clothes haven’t been a concern before, but being deprived of them for so long has opened her eyes to just how removed she has become from her life in Los Angeles. She’s starting to think back on that life with the nostalgia she has for the years she spent in Berkeley during college, or London during her year abroad, places she no longer inhabits but that have left a trace on her character. As this place will. She’ll always be a retainee, even if she leaves Madison tomorrow. This, too, she has in common with the other women here.

As she steps out of the shower, she finds Ana styling her hair at the sink. Drops of the gluey product she uses have fallen on her growing belly, staining the clean shirt she just got from the clothing office. “Shit,” she whispers, and shifts to her side against the sink. Emily faces the mirror in her bra, carefully applying cream to the base of her neck, the folds of her armpits, the inside of her elbows. The red bumps all over her upper body look like markers on a map. “It just keeps getting worse,” she complains. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Maybe it’s the soap you’re using,” Sara says.

“I stopped using soap.”

“The water, then.”

“Nothing I can do about that.”

Sara puts on her underwear, shirt, and pants, pausing at each item to savor the feeling of its cleanliness. “It could be one of these products,” she says, pointing to the janitorial cart that Marcela has left in the passageway.

“It was bad before I got put on custodial.”

Ana washes her hands at the sink. “Well, then, you’re allergic to retention.”

“Sounds about right.” Emily puts her shirt back on, then rolls up her sleeve so the tattoo on her arm shows. Staring at the mirror, she flexes her right bicep; the helmeted figure of the firefighter quivers. A look of satisfaction passes over her face. “At least I look good, right?”

“Right,” Sara says with a smile.

Marcela comes into the locker room just then, and places the spray bottle of glass cleaner in its space on the cart. “Jackson is waiting for you outside,” she tells Emily. “Says she needs you to report to the laundry room right away. It’s an emergency.”

Joy draining from her face, Emily glares at Sara as if it’s her fault, then leaves.

“How are you feeling?” Sara asks Ana. When they were at Victorville the poor woman had to station herself outside the bathroom to make it easier to reach the toilet. “Still getting morning sickness?”

Ana nods, puts a protective hand on her belly. “I feel like it’s getting worse.”

“It’s probably the stress,” Sara says. “And the food here isn’t helping. You know, it would be easier on you if you didn’t work. If you could get proper rest.”

Ana chuckles. “That’ll be the day.”

“I’m serious.” Sara takes her time gathering her filthy clothes into her mesh bag. “Why shouldn’t you rest? You’re in your third trimester now, right? If they say you’re a danger to your baby, the least they could do is let you rest so you can keep it safe. You have to think about your health, you know, because they’re not. Let them pay to run this place, they have all the money they need for that. There’s no need to contribute to your own detention.”

But when Sara tries to catch Ana’s gaze in the mirror, she looks away.

—

Another food service worker has been felled by the stomach flu, so Alice has been moved from Trailer C to cafeteria duty. She works the service window at lunch, handling both the hot wells and the cold foods by herself. Sweat seeps through the edges of her headwrap, darkening its pale green to an emerald color around the hairline. Sara asks how the day is going, asks if the mac and cheese has pork in it, if that green stuff is creamed spinach, but Alice won’t look her in the eye. That’s how it’s been ever since Sara mentioned a strike. Alice quickly fills out the tray, her attention on the warmers, determined to prove herself a model employee.

Sara carries her food into the dining room, and finds Toya eating alone at a table by the far wall. She has styled her hair à la gamine, with a part down the side, and refreshed its color to charcoal.

“You look great,” Sara says as she sits down. Whatever the handbook may claim, their bodies are their own, and every act of self-expression, however small, is a refusal to cede dominion over it. Her gaze travels across the cafeteria; it’s half-empty today.

“Jackson staggered the trailers’ lunch breaks,” Toya explains.

“Still trying to make the new deadline for Vox-R?”

“And she might. She got two newbies this morning, and already put them to work.”

The day is dark, made for brooding, yet Sara feels chatty, and apparently so does Toya—she relays a rumor that Hinton and Yee got into a loud argument outside the library, an occurrence they both find utterly unusual because Hinton never loses his temper. At all times he maintains a patrician attitude toward the junior agents, giving them direction or advice. He’s been acting strange since the evacuation.

“I hope you two are happy,” Emily says as she sits down with her tray. She starts to eat, jabbing angrily at her mac and cheese. “It’s insanely hot in the laundry room, and the thermostat isn’t working today.”

“It never did.”

“You could’ve at least waited until the schedule eased up. That nasty stomach bug is still going around.” She raises herself from her seat to survey the dining room. “Where’s Marcela?”

“She’s fine,” Toya replies. “I saw her leave when I was coming in. She got called to clean up vomit in the infirmary.”

“That’s gross.” Emily shakes her head. “Do you know how much laundry there is right now? Claire and I can’t catch up.”

“That’s the point,” Sara says. “This place can’t run without us.”

“Look, I get what you’re trying to do, I really do. But this is just stupid. You’re not gonna change anything about this place. You’re just making things harder for the rest of us.”

“That’s not what we want,” Sara replies.

“You’re free to work,” Toya says with a frown, “and we’re free to not.”

“Well, you not working affects me working. Did you stop to think about that?”

Sara puts a hand on Emily’s arm to reason with her, but all of a sudden Victoria appears. “Is this seat taken?”

Emily’s face lights up. “It is now.”

Victoria sits down and, while the other three women watch, goes about wiping down her tray and spork with a medicated wipe she pulls from a brand-new package. She’s fastidious about it; the process takes a couple of minutes to complete. Only then does she begin to eat. Her fingers are long and dainty, though her nails are bitten to the quick. “All this starch is killing me,” she complains. “I feel so bloated.”

“What’re you talking about?” Emily replies. “You’re so tiny.”

“I used to be, anyway,” Victoria says, in a tone that suggests she’s used to getting compliments about her looks. She takes a spoonful of mac and cheese and chews it slowly. Then, pointing her spork at Toya, she says, “I like your hair like this. Makes you look younger.”

Toya touches the ends of her hair. “You think so? It’s not too short?”

“Not at all. My mom wears it like this.”

“Well, then,” Toya replies, her voice sharpened by irritation, “I guess your mom has good taste.”

“Oh, she does. She has excellent taste in everything except men.”

Emily chuckles. “What about you?”

“I do okay.” Victoria grins. “Not just with men.” She turns her gaze on Emily. You intrigue me, her eyes seem to say, how come I didn’t notice you before?

What a flirt, Sara thinks, not without admiration. In her mind a picture forms of Victoria at a backyard party, in a sundress and with her hair finally free of its bun, surrounded by a clump of suitors eager to impress her.

“Did I hear you got moved to laundry?” Victoria asks.

All of a sudden Emily is at a loss for words.

“They put you with Claire Lopez, right?”

Another nod.

“And you like working in laundry?”

“Well.” Emily swallows her food. “I mean, it’s work. There’s not much to like. But it’s all right.”

“Is it now?” Toya says with a laugh. “It’s not too hot in there for you, what with that thermostat not working?”

Emily flushes. She gives Toya a look that says Please please please shut up.

Listening to the banter, Sara becomes curious about Victoria Aguilar. “You’re new in the clothing office,” she says, taking a bite of the mystery meat that sits next to the mac and cheese, and steeling herself against the taste. “Weren’t you in groundskeeping? Why’d you switch?”

“I didn’t want to be out in the sun all day,” Victoria replies.

“I see.”

“But you know,” Victoria adds, “what you said this morning got me thinking. So many people are sick with the stomach flu right now that it would only take ten or fifteen of us to quit for this place to shut down.”

Sara has always thought of Victoria as a performer, what with her mime routines and the card games she likes to play in the exercise yard, but up close it’s clear that there’s more substance to her. Where others have avoided talk of the strike, or ignored it altogether, she seems unafraid of it. Not just unafraid, but downright eager. “Why’d they make you take that urine test?” Sara asks.

“I guess someone filled out a Basic-10 on me.”

“But why’d they report you, do you think? Did you make yourself some enemies around here or what?”

Victoria shrugs. “Probably.”

“Some people don’t need a reason to snitch,” Emily puts in, her voice suddenly grave. “They do it for kicks, that’s all. They get off watching someone else being punished.”

“Exactly. But it didn’t matter. My test was clear.”

“See?”

“Anyway, I think you’re on to something,” Victoria continues. “I never wanted to work for these people anyway. I was told I’d be here three weeks, and it turned into five months. I’m sick of it. Let them figure out how to run this place without our help.”

“You got a point,” Emily says.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it,” Toya says with a glance at Sara, “the paths that people have to travel before they see the light.”

—

Fall might be here, Sara thinks as she walks around the track. The sun is out, and hot enough to burn the eyes, but there’s a bite to the breeze that blows across the exercise yard. The women are lifting weights, playing cards, eating snacks, all in white uniforms that, no matter how dirty they might become, stand out against the blacktop.

Meanwhile, Jackson sits under the breezeway, smoking a cigarette, lost in her thoughts. She’s waiting for the shift change at 1:30, when Walsh will come out to relieve her and she can go back to her office, there to worry about her looming deadline. She hasn’t bothered with earrings today, either, and her nail polish is chipped.

The attendants spend so much time monitoring us, Sara thinks, it never occurs to them that we’ve been monitoring them, too. We learn their schedules, their tastes, their habits and quirks. Sometimes even their fears. Sara continues walking around the track, but a minute before the shift change, she heads indoors to the administrative office.

Her skin breaks into goose bumps; the office has AC, so it’s a good ten degrees cooler than the rest of the building. One wall is painted a cheerful yellow, its only adornment the stylized lightbulb that serves as Safe-X’s logo. Another wall bears various plaques and commendations, many of them for Hinton, whose eyes follow her from six framed portraits at once. Fear burns in her stomach, but it’s the good kind of fear, the fear you get when you’re about to do something you should’ve done long ago.

Hinton has just arrived to relieve Williams. He’s still getting settled at the desk, finding a space for his water bottle and his fleece jacket. Doyle, the administrative assistant, is chattering on the phone, her back turned away from the service window.

“Excuse me,” Sara says.

Doyle swivels on her chair. She’s a pretty woman in her forties, with freckles dotting her face and a silver ring through her septum. “Hang on,” she tells whoever is on the other end of the line. “What is it?”

“I’d like to file a grievance.” Sara’s voice is clear, every syllable enunciated.

“Material or administrative? I only handle material complaints.”

“For one of the attendants? I guess that would be administrative.”

Doyle points to the kiosk ten feet from the service window. “Don’t you see the sign that says Administrative Complaint? Or is it that you can’t read?”

“Thank you,” Sara says cheerfully. She moves to one of the kiosks, waits for the system to recognize her face, and follows the prompts on the screen. What Would You Like to Report ? Misconduct. Date of Incident. October 30. Type of Incident. Dereliction of duty.

Before she can click to the next tab, Hinton is at her elbow. “What’re you doing?”

“Filling out a grievance.”

“Stop it,” he hisses.

“Give me my journal, then.”

“I don’t have it.”

“You threw it out?” The shock of this nearly takes her breath away. She turns back to the tablet and clicks on the next screen, typing quickly on the digital keyboard. Name of Offender. Hinton. Incident Description. While Madison was on alert for the Perris fire, and the attendants were preparing for the evacuation, Senior Attendant Hinton abandoned his post and went to hide in…

“Stop it,” he says again, pulling her away from the screen to stop her from typing. “Stop and listen to me for a second. I didn’t throw it out.”

“Where is it, then?”

“I had it when we evacuated. Put it in the trunk of my car. But I couldn’t go home, ’cause of the fire. I had to spend a few nights at my cousin’s house in Upland before I could go back to my place.” His voice turns angry. “My roof was damaged, all right? And I can’t get anyone to come out and look at it for another three weeks, so I’ve been a little busy dealing with that. I don’t give a shit about your precious little book, I’ll get it back for you.”

“When?”

Doyle has stopped talking on her phone. She’s hunched over her keyboard, pretending to work while eavesdropping on their conversation. Somewhere down the hall, a door opens and closes.

“When I have a day off. It’s a heck of a drive to Upland, in case you didn’t know.”

“You just said you had it in the trunk of your car.”

He heaves a sigh. “I left it at my cousin’s house. Like I said, I had a lot on my mind with the fire and everything. I’ll get it for you next Sunday.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

“I said I’ll get it for you, and I will.”

Sara wavers, and in that moment of hesitation Hinton touches the Cancel button on the form. “It’s always better to resolve grievances informally. That’s what it says, right there in the handbook. Section 8.4. Look it up.”