Page 4 of The Dream Hotel
M orning light silvers the glass-brick windows of the library. A sign taped to the wall above the return shelf says Quiet . Sara’s footsteps are muffled by the carpeting, but its mustiness combines with the smell of old paper to tickle her nose, and she sneezes. “Bless you,” someone behind her says in a stentorian voice. Alarmed, she turns around. The new girl has followed her here, the way a lost child trails after the first kind stranger it sees.
“Sorry,” Eisley says, dropping to a whisper. “Bless you. I wanted to ask, can I send an email from one of these computers?”
“No.” The five stations set up in the far corner allow retainees to access the news, Sara explains, and only from the few sources that Safe-X deems acceptable. “If you want to send an email, you have to pay for an account with PostPal.”
“Oh.” Eisley has sparse eyebrows, a blunt nose, a small mouth. A blank canvas of a face, a face about whom people would say that you couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. She seems about as threatening as a fish on a bed of crushed ice. “I just…I want to email my husband.”
“Sure. But you’ll need an account with PostPal.”
“Is it expensive?”
“It’s $400 every two months.”
“But I’m only here three weeks.”
“That’s how their billing system works. And then you have to rent a tablet from them to read your email. They’ll explain everything to you when you open the account.”
Eisley takes in the wood-paneled circulation desk, the three reading tables, the stacks where old books—some held together with tape, others missing a cover or a few pages—line the shelves. “Do I have to pay to read books, too?”
“No.” The books come from a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization that wants to encourage reading across the country’s crime-prevention facilities; it buys stock that shuttered schools and colleges intend to pulp and redistributes it to retention centers at no cost. The collection at Madison is small—fifteen hundred titles—but being the only public resource at the retention center it is also the most precious. “Those are free.”
Someone has taken another seat at the computers.
“PostPal is right down the hall to your right.”
Eisley leaves, finally.
Sara gets the last open spot at the computers. She likes to take her time with the national papers, which she reads with more care than she did before her retention, when she was so busy with the twins that she only glanced at the headlines on her way to work. This morning, a financial scandal implicating a ten-term congressman from Arizona dominates the front page of the Los Angeles Times, along with coverage of wildfires in Oregon, floods in Texas, and a blizzard in Ohio. Nothing terribly new. But below the fold she finds a report on OmniCloud’s plans to buy an education technology firm whose software is used in K–12 schools across the country. OmniCloud wants to mine the data to help its corporate clients hire workers whose histories best match the positions they have open—or get rid of those who may not be ideal for the positions they already have.
OmniCloud continues to grow at an astonishing pace, Sara thinks, its only serious competition the Chinese conglomerate that a handful of senators want to outlaw. OmniCloud is always hungry; it can function only by feeding itself continually. Not for the first time, she’s reminded of the dusty colonial censuses she consulted when she was writing her dissertation at Berkeley, each edition thicker than the one preceding it on the shelf. The earliest censuses were counts of populations in different territories of the British Empire, but as time passed the volumes expanded into a massive trove of information on colonial subjects, listing everything from their age and occupation to their marital status, and even their so-called infirmities. If she needed to find out how many able-bodied male workers there were in Gambia in 1930, all she had to do was find the right table.
Now it is her turn to enter the census, one digital step at a time, leaving traces she never intended to leave. Someday, when her children are old enough, they, too, will become lines in OmniCloud’s giant database, every facet of their behavior catalogued and quantified and sold for purposes she can scarcely imagine yet. A fierce protective instinct uncoils inside her. She has to get out of this place; she has to shield them from the single eye and countless tentacles of OmniCloud—but how?
From his seat by the door, the attendant on duty is watching. Sara pretends not to notice, continues reading the news. The widow of a rapper she’s never heard of is said to be preparing an auction of his art collection at Sotheby’s. A review of the new play by Lynn Nottage declares it a return to form for the elderly playwright. Two VR creators are suing each other over copyright of their latest venture, after it was adapted into a dinner party game. Sara makes an effort to read arts and culture news, though there are days when she can’t imagine ever going back to sitting in an office at the museum, cataloguing photographs or typing messages that begin with per my last email.
At least not for a while. In the fantasies of freedom she entertains late at night in her room, the place she keeps returning to is Mirror Lake, up in Yosemite. She used to visit thirty years ago, when she was a little girl, yet she remembers with startling clarity how it felt to sit under a view of Half Dome, with only the drone of bees and the whirring of grasshoppers in her ears. Back then she was too young to have a phone; she could still move without being tracked, speak without being recorded, play without being monitored. Gazing at the granite walls of Half Dome, she felt as small and anonymous as a speck of dust. Will it ever be possible to be that free again? That is what she wants to find out. She wants to lie on that lakeside again and see only nature from horizon to horizon.
She’s about to start The New York Times, which has a front-page report on a looming Senate fight over the Crime Prevention Act, when Alice walks into the library.
Immediately, Williams stands up. His uniform is crisp, the bronze stripe on his sleeve still fresh. “Hussein,” he calls, “time’s up. Give your seat to Carter.”
“I don’t need the computer,” Alice tells him. She wears a pale green headwrap, which she won an appeal to have returned to her, weeks after Hinton confiscated it. Over her uniform she has on a gray, pilling cardigan and a black cord from which dangle her reading glasses. She goes to the fiction section, running her finger against the spines as she looks for what to read next.
Sara returns to the standoff in the Senate over the renewal of a key provision of the CPA.
“The limit’s twenty minutes,” Williams says.
This isn’t true. The signs that are posted at the entrance of the library say nothing about time limits on the computers; they list only the hours of operation and the kind of materials the computers will allow the retainees to access—newspapers, law journals, educational texts.
From the circulation desk, Ana watches, a hand resting on the mound of her belly. She knows there is no rule about time limits, but she can’t contradict an attendant, not even a rookie, and risk the cushy library assignment she was given because of her pregnancy.
“Hussein.” Williams is young; he can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two. He used to work as an orderly in a mental health facility before getting hired here, but he’s adapted quickly to Madison, enforcing rules he makes up on the spot.
Sara decides to let the matter drop. “All yours,” she says. She takes the Borges stories to the return shelf and wanders into the stacks, looking for something new.
At 7:25, the work bell rings. She scans the book she selected and rushes out.
—
The ceiling lights in Trailer D are dim. Sara walks down the third row, where workers sit one after the other in front of screens, their faces bathed in blue. She stops at her assigned station, waits for the system to recognize her face, then clicks Start . A movie clip begins to play. The question she has to answer is always the same: Is This Real? She must choose one of three answers: Yes , No , or I Can’t Tell . The work is part of a contract between Safe-X and NovusFilm, a studio that wants to improve the generative capabilities of its software.
The clip starts with an establishing shot of a home, then the camera closes in on the kitchen window, where a young woman is washing dishes at the sink. The scene is restaged in different landscapes and lighting conditions—a tiny house at sunset, a bungalow on a bright summer day, a log cabin cloaked in darkness. Again and again, the woman is shown washing dishes, her brows furrowed in concentration. Sara clicks at a steady pace. While the studio’s AI performs well with geometric shapes, and can generate architectural styles from around the world, it has trouble creating realistic weather patterns. The snow on this thatched roof looks too symmetrical, she notices. The grass around that mobile home is too uniform.
Is This Real?
No.
At the bottom of her screen, a counter measures the time it takes her to respond to each clip. Longer response times suggest that the human interpreter is growing uncertain or unreliable, which is why each clip has to be viewed by a second retainee. Safe-X is responsible for maintaining the high work standards it committed to when it agreed to review 800,000 reels for NovusFilm.
The next set of clips shows a man driving along a winding road in different vehicles. A blue motorcycle. A vintage Volkswagen. A zippy sports car. NovusFilm customers will be able to choose from an array of options when they watch the action-adventure movie that the studio releases each season. Sara clicks at a steady pace.
Is This Real?
Yes.
Time passes. Her neck and shoulders start to hurt. Sometimes she finds it hard to tell whether she’s looking at a real person, especially when the subject faces the camera and the lighting is good. Along with her response time, the counter at the bottom of her screen measures her accuracy. If she clicks on the same response too many times in a row, she could be deemed a bad employee—or worse, a saboteur. She has to consider each clip carefully, give a truthful answer. That means looking for details that stick out. Like this guy in a helmet, sweating as he ascends a hill on his bike: the braids on either side of his head are too parallel, too perfect.
Is This Real?
No.
The next clip is of a baby. A brown-haired boy, sitting in a barber’s chair, wrapped in a nylon cape. He looks terrified; the yellow rattle that someone out of the frame is shaking seems to be an attempt at distracting him. Is This Real? But now Sara is back in Madison’s visiting room, on that warm January afternoon when Elias brought the twins to visit her for the first time. Back then he didn’t know the best times to schedule his visits, so he’d gotten caught in monstrous traffic out of Los Angeles. “I’m sorry we’re late,” he’d said, standing up when she walked in behind Hinton.
Even with dark circles under his eyes, Elias seemed full of life, sated with freedom. All of a sudden she became aware of what set her apart from him, from everyone outside Madison, and was overcome with the reckless hope that he would break her out of this place. What they’re saying about me isn’t true, she wanted to say, take me home with you, please take me home. And when he put his arms around her it seemed to her for a moment as if he had, until the scent of hand sanitizer brought her back to the gray walls of the visiting room. “It’s gonna be okay,” he was saying. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“You don’t believe them, do you?” she whispered.
He lifted her chin with a finger and looked into her face. Holding her breath, she watched him watch her. Did he wonder if, beneath the placid features he had known for years, she harbored violent urges? “No,” he said. “Of course not.”
On the quilted blanket he had spread out over the cement floor, Mona was playing with a set of plastic rings while Mohsin was trying to pull off one of his socks. “Hi, babies,” she called as she kneeled beside them. She picked up Mona first, holding her close and kissing her over and over on the cheek. “Did you miss Mama?” she asked, wiping the little girl’s drool with a bib.
Then she hoisted Mohsin onto her lap as well. How she had missed the weight of their wriggling bodies! “They smell so good,” she said, resting her cheek against Mohsin’s head. That’s when she noticed his newly shorn hair. “You got it cut?” she asked Elias.
Before her trip to London, she’d been planning to take Mohsin to a kids’ salon. She’d wanted to save a lock of hair, take pictures, add a page to his keepsake book. The extent of what was being stolen from her was beginning to reveal itself, threatening to bring tears, but she tamped down the impulse; she wanted to enjoy this visit with her family.
“It was getting into his eyes,” Elias explained, his voice brimming with apology. “And he’s so close to walking now, I didn’t want to chance a fall.”
“Right. Of course.” She kissed her son’s hair again, breathing in his delicious smell. “I wish I could’ve been there is all.”
“I know.” Elias put his hand on her knee. He asked how she was holding up, if she got over the cold she’d caught when she was admitted, if she needed more money in her commissary account. “They said if we didn’t have cash, I could link your account to my credit card.”
She shook her head; she didn’t really need anything. At the other end of the room, Emily and her girlfriend sat at a table, heads bent over a document they were discussing, whispering in order to maintain a shred of privacy. Alice was standing by the vending machines, having what looked like an argument with her teenage son. Back then Sara still thought of the other retainees as strangers—strangers who might commit crimes—and she was afraid of them. So she kept to herself, hoping that isolation would lead to self-preservation.
“It’s not gonna be long,” Elias said, trying to sound encouraging. “Just keep your head down and follow the rules. Don’t get into any more trouble. You’ll be home soon.”
“It’s just that this place…” Sara’s voice trailed off. This place is a nightmare, she wanted to say, except it was a nightmare that everyone else seemed to be dreaming as well. The table, the chairs, the blank walls of the visiting room were real, but reality itself had become slippery. Nothing seemed to penetrate it, flip it back into the world as she knew it.
The twins started to fidget. How did she look to them, she wondered, in an all-white uniform and with her hair tied into the severe bun mandated by the Safe-X handbook? Even her hands looked different, now that her rings, watch, and bracelet had been taken away. Could they perceive, in their own limited ways, that something strange had happened to her?
Guilt began to prick her. Guilt at putting herself in this situation. Guilt at being away from the twins just as they were about to start walking. Guilt at having time to eat, and read, and sleep while Elias had to go to work and return home to teething, crawling twins. Even with help from his parents, it was too much for him to handle, surely.
Then Mohsin tried to climb down from Sara’s lap. “Stay, baby,” she begged, even as her son pushed her away. Aware of the cameras on the wall, she didn’t dare insist. All she could do was put out her hand and wait for him to come back. Skin hunger, the experts call it. But hunger is ordinary, it’s what people experience every day. Hunger can be satisfied immediately, and repeatedly. What she felt was different; it was starvation.
“He’s a little cranky,” Elias said as he took the boy from her and put him back on the blanket. Rummaging through the clear plastic bag that Safe-X made him buy, he took out a stuffed parrot. “It was such a long drive.”
“What about you?” Sara asked her daughter. “You’re not tired, are you?” Mona cooed, allowing herself to be hugged and kissed without complaint. After a while she tried to stand on teetering little feet. She seemed on the verge of taking a step, but changed her mind and thrust her arms up. Right away Sara scooped her up. “She’s getting close to walking, too.”
“It was nice of that attendant to help,” Elias said.
“Who?”
“Tall guy who brought you. Hinton?”
“Hinton? What’d he do?”
“He helped me with the stroller and set up the blanket for me.”
Sara shook her head. “That can’t be him. It must’ve been somebody else.”
“No, it was him.”
That doesn’t make sense, she wanted to say. Hinton is incapable of showing kindness, you must be mistaken.
But Elias’s attention had already shifted to Mohsin. “Go back to Mama. Go say hi.”
It took Mohsin a little while to relinquish the safety of the blanket. Sara had just sat him down on her lap again when a metallic voice came on the loudspeaker. “Hussein. Visit’s over.”
Sara pretended not to hear, held on to her baby boy until the warning repeated thirty seconds later. She stood as Elias picked up each child and walked out. She stood there a minute, looking at the door, her hands balled into fists.
Is This Real?
I Can’t Tell.