Page 42 of The Dream Hotel
T he new cameras are installed on a chilly morning in November, twenty-two translucent domes with built-in microphones, emotion-tracking software, and optical zoom. But the CRO must not be entirely satisfied with the images they beam to the control room, because he has put a raft of new measures in place. The number of foot patrols doubles across the facility. A janitorial closet, notorious for being a blind spot, is bolted shut. The seating limit at cafeteria tables is cut by half, to four residents per table, presumably to allow for clearer sound capture. And all this, Sara thinks, because the strikers total twelve.
“Maybe he’s feeling the pressure,” she tells Toya. They are in the showers, shivering as they wash under the lukewarm water, one of the lightbulbs flickering above them. They speak with urgency and little preamble, aware of how precious their time away from the cameras is. Yet this constraint also lends their meetings a rare intimacy.
“How many people are out sick?” Toya asks. “I counted thirty-two.”
“Thirty-three, I think. One of the newbies is out.”
“Okay, so let’s say thirty-three. And with our twelve, that’s forty-five. I don’t see how they’re gonna make the deadline for Vox-R. They’re gonna have to push it a third time.”
“If we keep it up,” Sara says as the water shuts off, “the CRO will have to pay a penalty for breach of contract.”
As they’re toweling off at the lockers, Marcela walks in with an industrial-size soap container and starts to refill the dispensers at the sink. The few times they’ve approached her about the strike, Marcela was unsympathetic, afraid of losing the guitar it took her weeks to get. But the story about Eisley Richardson has been making the rounds, no doubt with added lurid details, and when they bring up the strike again she seems less adamant.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
Progress, Sara thinks.
Then, one after the other, the strikers lose access to the commissary. No matter how often they present their faces to the scanner, or the angle they use, the system responds with User Not Recognized. Victoria shrugs it off; she had only pennies left in her account. But Emily has been locked out of the money for her art supplies, Toya for her cigarettes. So they have to barter for the things they need, using what little luxuries they’ve managed to procure during their retention—a bobby pin, a pencil, a face mask.
Bartering is forbidden, the CRO announces one morning.
The attendants keep an especially close eye on Sara. Whenever she walks into another retainee’s cell, Hinton arrives within minutes to conduct a surprise inspection. If she goes to the exercise yard, Jackson comes out from under the breezeway to watch her. If she takes a shower, she finds Yee waiting outside the locker room, asking her why she’s dawdling.
The heat on her is such that she’s afraid to use words like strike or boycott and must resort to codes like crossword or cricket. That she is losing the ability to communicate in ordinary language seems to her only the latest absurdity in a long series that started nearly a year earlier. Or perhaps it started before, but content with the small pleasures and enclosed freedoms of her life, she didn’t notice.
—
She is putting a clean sheet on her cot one afternoon when Hinton appears in the doorway. Her first thought is of her cellmate, who for the last few days has been fretting about increasing retaliation, but it seems her turn has come first. What bogus charge will the senior attendant try to pin on her in order to slap her with an extension? What obscure violation will he reveal? Without realizing it she takes a step back, and finds herself standing on the dirty linens that have been cast to the floor. She moves again, this time closer to the other cot, and hits her knee on the metal, sending pins and needles down her leg. “Shit.”
Hinton watches from the doorway, his eyes never leaving hers.
“What is it?” she asks, her voice flat. “What do you want?”
From the zipper pocket of his fleece he pulls out the notebook. “I drove all the way to Upland to get it for you.”
It’s a standard composition notebook, but it has her name on the front cover and that blot of blue ink on the side where her pen once leaked. Her heart leaps with joy; it’s as if a dear friend she hasn’t seen in months has suddenly appeared at her door.
As she steps forward to claim it, he withdraws it again. “On one condition.”
“What is it?”
“Get back to work.”
“No.”
“No?”
“That wasn’t the agreement we had.”
“Well,” he says, “consider our agreement unilaterally amended due to one party failing to meet their obligations.”
This fucking guy. Always trying to sound sophisticated, and always at the worst moment. “I never promised you I would work,” she replies. “And by the way, there’s no rule that says I have to work. This isn’t a prison, remember? I haven’t been convicted of a crime, and I can’t be compelled to work by any correctional entity, whether public or private. You should know this, it’s in the handbook.”
“You know I lost my mom to cancer, too.” He flips through her journal, as if looking for a specific passage he wants to reread. More than half the pages are covered with her neat handwriting, and the frequent thumbing through has made the booklet thicker. “Breast cancer, in her case. It happened fast, she was already at Stage 4 when they diagnosed her. I was just a kid, it messed me up for a while.”
Is he seriously asking for her sympathy, after everything he’s done? She looks at him searchingly. His face is somber, his eyes cast down. In all the time she’s known him, he’s never revealed anything about his private life. Losing her mother set her adrift for years; the grief would’ve sunk her if it’d happened when she was a child. But is he even telling the truth? Maybe he’s lying again, trying to create the illusion that they have something in common. It’s his way of saying I understand you, I’ve been in your shoes, now it’s time for you to be in mine.
When he raises his eyes again, she meets them with a blank face.
A long minute passes.
“I see what you’ve been doing here,” Hinton says, changing tacks. “You’re collecting evidence. Presenting your own stories, your own interpretations. It’s gonna make a big difference to your case when the time comes.” He makes a show of flipping through the journal, then closes it with a snap. “So do you want it?”
Of course she wants it. “We agreed that you’d bring it,” she says cautiously, “and in return I wouldn’t fill out a grievance. That’s what we agreed on. That was the deal.”
“That was the deal three weeks ago. Things are different now. The CRO doesn’t care about the mess of the evacuation anymore, I can tell you that. He has other priorities now.”
She swallows, though her mouth feels dry. The leverage she once had has vanished, and now she feels a rush of regret that she didn’t fill out a complaint immediately on her return from Victorville. How foolish of her to make a deal with Hinton. What was she thinking? What made her believe he could be trusted to keep his end of the bargain?
“If you go back to work,” Hinton continues, smoothing out a dog-eared page with his thumbnail, “sooner or later the other residents will, too.”
“If the others don’t want to work, that’s their choice.”
“You’re underestimating your powers of persuasion. If you go back, I think you’ll find that the others will, eventually. Then I give you your notebook, and you can go back to writing your little stories. This place runs smoothly again. Everyone wins.”
Look after your own interests, in other words. That’s what her lawyer says, what her husband says, what her cousin says. It’s what she tried to do for months—minding her business, following every rule, trying to appear more compliant, more deserving of freedom than others stuck in this place. But what did that achieve, in the end? She’s still stuck here, still marked as a Questionable . And in the meantime she’s been depleted of her dignity. Only in the last few weeks has she been able to regain some measure of self-respect. To give it up now would endanger her survival.
“Here.” Hinton holds out her journal. It is the only record she has of the past 340 days, the only way she can counter whatever story the RAA has concocted about her. “All you have to do is go back to work.”
Prison is a place beyond shame. She uses the toilet in front of her cellmate, showers in open stalls, receives mail that the attendants have already pawed through for anything valuable or forbidden. To abandon the other women who joined the strike would mean not only accepting this shame as ordinary, but validating it. “No. Keep it.”
She turns around and continues making her cot.
“You’re a real pain in the neck, you know that?”
—
Sara sits in the half-empty cafeteria, shivering in her uniform, waiting for the dim light of a November morning to reach her table. Having been relegated to the end of the service line, she’s received no eggs, only a small serving of potatoes and a piece of toast. Toya managed to get the last cup of herbal tea, which she holds for a moment between her hands to try to warm them. While they eat, they talk about their suspension from the library, and the commissary, and the television room, and soon, they fear, the exercise yard.
The strike has given them purpose these last few days. It has nurtured their hopes, shielded them from gloom. But without access to the rec room or the library, how will they occupy themselves during the eighteen hours from lights on to lights out? Boredom is dangerous. If they want the strike to have a chance of succeeding, they have to find ways to keep themselves and the others busy.
“We could start a zine,” Sara suggests.
“Didn’t they deny a petition for one?” Toya replies. “Last month, remember?”
“Right. But I think that petition was for distributing printed materials inside the facility, wasn’t it? We can skip all that. I mean, we can’t afford to print and distribute a hundred twenty copies, anyway. We can write the zine in longhand, a single copy, and pass it around. They can’t stop us from doing that.”
“Maybe.”
For a while they discuss the contributions they might make, or seek from others, writing that could not only keep them and their fellow strikers entertained, but also sustain them in some small way, give them what relief there is in knowing that they’re not alone. The more they talk, the more Sara becomes animated by the idea of a collaborative zine.
Emily and Victoria arrive, engrossed in a conversation about photography, of all things, Victoria saying it was a hobby she got into when the casino where she worked closed for two weeks after a cyberattack on its computer systems, and how much she misses it. “I know how you feel,” Emily replies. She used to take pictures of people and objects she wanted to draw in her comic, keeping the photographs as references, but here at Madison she can’t have a camera, and it makes the work less precise, more complicated.
“But you have plenty of models,” Sara teases, thinking about how her roommate hasn’t been asking her to pose lately, now that she’s become close with Victoria. “How would you like to draw a new comic? A one-page strip about this place?”
The idea seems to appeal to Emily, though she worries about paper, which she has been rationing ever since she lost access to the commissary. They talk about other practicalities, like whether they should use ink or erasable pencil, collate with staples or yarn. Ever since the strike began, they’ve had to adapt to limited resources, a constraint that, paradoxically, has made them more creative.
Hinton walks into the cafeteria just then, flanked this morning by Williams, who has looped his thumbs into his belt, as though he were merely an observer sent to shadow the senior attendant on his rounds. Together they move to the attendant station by the far wall, where they confer in hushed voices with Yee. A fourth attendant appears, joining the huddle.
All talk about the zine stops, the entire table watching and waiting. Across the cafeteria, the air becomes electric with expectation.
And then Hinton walks over to their table, his deputies trailing behind him. “You and you,” he says, pointing to Sara and Toya. “Stand up and come with me.”
Toya and Sara exchange a glance. What will he charge them with this time? They’ve barely been up for a couple of hours, they haven’t had time to break any of the new rules the CRO has imposed. “What is this about?” Sara manages to ask.
“Come on, Hussein. Up, up, up. I don’t have all day. Stand up and come with me.”
Panic seizes her. This isn’t a write-up, she realizes, which in any case he could fill out right here on his Tekmerion; he wants to take her somewhere else, to take both of them somewhere else, and he has brought reinforcements with him. “Where are you taking us?”
Hinton touches the zip ties at his belt. “Don’t make me cuff you. You wouldn’t like it.” And then, with a wink at his deputies, he adds, “Or maybe you would, I don’t know.”
Williams chuckles.
But Emily reaches across the table and touches Sara’s arm. It’s going to be okay, the gesture says. Don’t be afraid, we’re all in this together. Whatever happens, don’t be afraid.
Sara and Toya stand up, one after the other. The junior attendants clasp their arms, as if they might try to escape, and lead them behind Hinton out of the cafeteria.