Page 44 of The Dream Hotel

T he two agents sit side by side at a desk. One is a gray-haired man in a linen blazer and jeans, with two tablets and a phone laid out in front of him. The other is a young woman dressed from head to toe in black: frock, stockings, shoes. Even the row of pearls around her neck is black. The choice seems deliberate, a sartorial way of conveying that, even if she’s only in her twenties, she’s in a position of power. The fragrance she has on is light and citrusy, but after so much time in retention Sara finds the scent overwhelming. She sneezes.

“Ms. Hussein,” the man says, in a voice that grates like sandpaper. “Have a seat.”

Sara takes the only chair across from them.

“I’m Agent Bradley,” the man continues. “With me this fine morning is Agent Mendoza. We will be conducting your evaluation and providing a recommendation for the RAA. Any questions before we begin?”

“My lawyer isn’t here.”

Bradley puts on the reading glasses that dangle from a black cord around his neck. “Mr. Abdo, correct? This is an expedited assessment, though.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need a lawyer for this. We just want to ask a few questions.”

“I have a right to a lawyer.”

“Of course, you do. But this is an expedited assessment.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” With a glance at the door, Sara asks, “Is that why I wasn’t given any notice about this hearing? Hinton pulled us from the cafeteria in the middle of breakfast and brought us here. I didn’t have time to call my lawyer.”

“Let me back up for a minute,” Agent Bradley says. “The RAA has taken note of the backlog of cases at this facility and has charged Themis Legal Services with providing expedited assessments for select retainees. These assessments take no more than ninety minutes. Of course, you have a right to decline and wait for a regular hearing, whenever there’s an opening in the RAA’s schedule. Is that what you’d like to do, Ms. Hussein?” Bradley asks, peering at Sara over the rim of his reading glasses.

So this is why they’re meeting in the music room of the annex, half a block down the street, instead of the first-floor classroom at Madison, where everyone else had their hearings. The desk is set up on the dais where teachers once conducted students in choir or violin, with Sara’s chair so near the edge that she must be careful not to move it or else she’ll fall backward. As in the main facility, the walls of this room, including the sconces and wainscoting, were painted a cool white, trading historical charm for blank purity.

Bradley and Mendoza are still waiting for Sara to decide. Either she answers their questions, and gets a chance to finally go home, or she goes back to waiting for who knows how long until her hearing is scheduled. “It’s entirely up to you,” Mendoza says. “You’ve been here a long time.”

“343 days,” Sara replies.

Bradley’s eyes travel to the clock on the wall, then settle on her again.

Should she agree to the expedited hearing or wait for the regular one? Nothing about the agents’ demeanor tells her which alternative is better for her case.

“And aside from the Class As in December and January,” Mendoza continues, “you’ve had a pretty clean record for the rest of the year.” She scrolls on her tablet, then stops. “Well, there’s that Class B on October 18, but that one’s a little harsh.”

“Hinton?” Bradley asks.

Mendoza nods. “The footage shows that the fight was between retainees Marcela DeLeón and Lucy Everett. You and Toya Jones were bystanders, as far as I can tell.”

“I tried to stop the fight.”

“You were being a Good Samaritan,” Mendoza continues.

Why are they being so reasonable all of a sudden? The headache starts as a slow, steady beat along Sara’s right temple. She presses a finger there, feeling for the incipient pain, wishing she could have a glass of water, but save for the agents’ tablets and phones, the desk is bare.

“You don’t have a criminal record, either.”

“No.”

Mendoza looks up from her tablet. “Like I said, it’s a pretty clean file.”

“So why am I still here, then?”

At this, both agents turn to their tablets again, and it dawns on Sara that they’ve taken her question for consent. The assessment has begun.

“The algorithm is holistic,” Mendoza says. “It considers two hundred sources. Legal and financial, of course, but also familial, educational, reputational—”

“You have an R-785,” Bradley cuts in, without regard for his colleague’s attempt to give the introduction she has so clearly rehearsed. He scrolls through the bill of retention on his tablet. “The police at Heathrow received a harassment complaint made against you by a passenger on a December 22nd flight from London to Los Angeles. Later that same day, you have an R-97, making a false statement to an RAA officer.”

“But I already explained what happened at Heathrow. I called the flight attendant because the guy next to me was choking, I never harassed him. It was the crew who decided to get him off the flight, not me. My lawyer has filed a counter-complaint with British police about this.” If only she could get the word out to Adam Abdo. Her gaze travels to the door, before returning to settle on Bradley. “And as for the RAA officer, I never lied. I explained to him that my employer was covering my trip, which they were supposed to do once I turned in my receipts. He just misunderstood.”

“The data doesn’t lie.”

“It doesn’t tell the truth, either.”

“I wasn’t finished, Ms. Hussein. You also have an R-471, for troublesome dreams. They are what caused the RAA officer’s concern.”

“What dreams?”

“For example,” he says, consulting his tablet, “on May 12 of last year, you had a dream that while your husband was in the bath, you added Xanax to his cup of tea.”

She has no memory of this dream. It would’ve made more sense if in the dream she’d put the pill into her own cup of tea rather than Elias’s, but dream logic isn’t real logic. She wants to point this out to Bradley, but he’s busy rattling off her suspicious dreams.

“—Then on October 9, you had a dream that you pushed him into the river.”

“It was a nightmare,” she replies. If anything, it was triggered by the RAA’s accusations, which upended her life and tormented her for eleven months, adding a psychic burden she has found hard to carry. That is why her brain started working out different simulations in her dreams, but never coming up with anything more damning than an accident at the river.

“—A couple of weeks later, you had a dream about poisoning the soup.”

She swallows. “I would never hurt Elias. This was just a dream.”

“Every murder starts with a fantasy,” Bradley says, his jaw tight.

You should’ve taken Hinton’s offer, a voice inside her says, and accepted the journal. You could look up every dream he’s brought up, offer your own story for each one. She closes her ears to the suggestion. She wants to be free, and what is freedom if not the wresting of the self from the gaze of others, including her own? Life is meant to be lived, to be seized for all the beauty and joy to be wrung out of it; it isn’t meant to be contained and inventoried for the sake of safety.

“And to be clear, it’s not your dreams alone,” Mendoza adds. “The algorithm is considering your dreams in conjunction with your other behavior.”

In the second before Sara answers, the labyrinthine pathways of data leading to this moment suddenly light up: dozens of texts she sent to her friend Myra, complaining about Elias’s unbridled spending; footage of their argument outside the Volvo dealership; her attempts to get one of his credit cards cancelled; late-night searches for a couples therapist.

Mountains of data that testify to her most intimate frustrations, her most shameful resentments. Like a fortune-teller reading tea leaves, the algorithm made up stories as it was going along, until it found one that was plausible enough to please its audience. Sara presses her fingers to her temples, trying to stop the throbbing. “I don’t know how many times I can say it. I would never hurt my husband.”

“The RAA takes risks of domestic violence seriously,” Bradley says.

Mendoza takes out one of the long pins that keeps her hair in a severe bun on her nape. With a fingernail she scratches a tender spot on her scalp, a look of relief blooming on her face. “How would you interpret these dreams, then, Ms. Hussein? Tell us.”

“I wouldn’t interpret them literally, for starters. My husband and I have our problems, like any other couple. That doesn’t mean I would wish him dead, much less that I had any plans to murder him.” She shakes her head. “I have a mortal fear of water. I’m sure that’s why it appears so often in my dreams.”

“You’re saying that we need to interpret these dreams in context.”

“That’s right.” Sara sits back, but her movement unsteadies the chair and she nearly falls backward. Groping at the air, she regains her balance. “And the context,” she says, as she shifts her chair, “is that my husband and I were trying to adjust to being new parents. We never expected to have twins. It was a radical change to our lives, and it required so much of us. My dreams, well…they must’ve reflected my anxiety about being a mom and my frustration with him, that’s all.”

“But what if you’ve been suspected of something like this in the past?” Mendoza asks. Her voice is soothing, like a therapist trying to coax some understanding or revelation out of a stubborn patient. “Wouldn’t that be relevant context, as you say? You were interviewed in connection with the death of your brother, isn’t that right?”

It takes Sara a minute to parse what Mendoza is implying. Memories of that summer party thirty years ago in Pasadena return to her, jumbled up even more than usual by the gravity of the agents’ accusations. The intolerable heat that afternoon. The smell of the jackets in the hall closet where she hid when they started playing hide-and-seek. The dollar she found when she started digging through one of the jacket pockets. And then the blinding light when she came out. All the adults standing around the pool. Her uncle kneeling over Sa?d’s body, giving him CPR. For months afterwards she had dreams that Sa?d was still alive, that he’d only been away at summer camp or having a sleepover with a friend. Now the agents are digging through that painful time in order to make a case. “My brother drowned in a pool when we were kids.” Her voice is shaking, she realizes, both at the memory and at the realization that the algorithm might have detected what she’s worked so hard to keep buried for three decades—her guilt.

The algorithm knows so much about her already, going all the way down to the nucleic acids that twist in a helix inside her cells. Is it so strange that it has identified her true nature? “It was an accident,” she says.

“But the police interviewed you,” Bradley insists.

“I was nine years old.” Her head is throbbing. All she wants is to close her eyes, shut out this room and everyone in it, and yet she must remain alert, must choose her words carefully if she is to persuade them to release her. “And I didn’t see anything, I was hiding in a closet. I suppose the officers did talk to me that day, to figure out what happened, establish a timeline, that sort of thing. But I didn’t…” She shakes her head. How can she convince them she is innocent, if she herself isn’t sure she isn’t responsible? “They said my brother had been trying to hide in an inflatable and fell in the pool. The medical examiner ruled the death an accident.”

“You understand why we have to take this seriously, Ms. Hussein. It’s not just your husband’s life that may be at stake here. There are children in the home.”

This guy reminds Sara of her old doctor. He would start typing clinical notes from the moment he stepped into the exam room, barely looking at her as she described the symptoms that had brought her to see him. I know what it is, he’d say. He was so sure his diagnosis was correct that he would put in a referral or send out a prescription order before she was finished talking about her illness. That’s the kind of listening Bradley is doing at the moment: a listening keyed only to specific words. “If you’re planning on detaining every woman who’s had arguments with her husband,” she says, “you’re going to have your hands full.”

“You’re not every woman.”

What a bizarre thing to say. Is she expected to behave exactly the same as every other woman in their database, or else she’ll arouse suspicions? She is Sara Tilila Hussein. She’s never pretended or even wanted to be anyone else.

But that is the trouble. The merchants of data who’ve spent decades building a taxonomy of human behavior find outliers troublesome. By definition outliers aren’t predictable, which also means they’re not profitable. Soon, their actions become aberrant, their ideas peculiar, their lives transgressive: they are delinquents.

“Is that it?” she asks.

“Is what it?”

“Is that the substance of your accusation?” she asks. Rage has entered her voice, but she doesn’t care. These agents know she has been at Madison for nothing more than a minor squabble at the airport in London, a poorly phrased statement, a few dreams, a connection to something that happened thirty years ago. How can they admit this late in the process that she was detained not because her dreams showed that she was planning to commit a crime, but because an RAA agent who was intent on putting her in her place seized on her nightmares? Now a crime has to be identified. And if not identified, then manufactured. That is why they’re digging into her past, all the way to her childhood. They have nothing else. “You’re saying I’m a danger to my husband, even though he himself has denied it?”

“Well,” Bradley says, and returns to scrolling on his tablet. “There is the matter of your cousin.” A subtle tilt of Mendoza’s head suggests that she finds this line of investigation useless, though she is reluctant to contradict Bradley. He continues, blithely unaware of her signal. “I see here that he’s been in touch with you, but in your interview with the RAA you said you hadn’t seen him in years.”

“I haven’t. I can’t stop him from writing me.”

“And anyway his score has dropped considerably,” Mendoza says, before toggling to another tab on her screen. “Is it your contention, then, that you’re not a danger to your husband? That you’re a law-abiding citizen?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I’m not a danger to my husband, and I obey the law.”

“Because your record at this facility indicates otherwise.”

But didn’t they say earlier that her file was clean? Or was that a lie? Doubt gnaws at her, depleting the confidence she has tried to project. She doesn’t know how to respond. Everything that comes out of her mouth seems objectionable to these agents, another reason to keep her in retention. She has no idea when this will end. Perhaps never. Perhaps she will never regain her place among the living.

The door flies open just then, and a man in a paisley shirt and blue jeans steps inside. The ease with which he strides across the room conveys he is familiar with these proceedings; he has been watching from the other side of the camera mounted on the wall. “I can speak to the resident’s record at this facility,” he says, in a voice that Sara recognizes as the CRO’s.

Bradley looks flustered. “Oh, hello.”

Mendoza stands up to offer her hand, and Bradley follows suit. “What a nice surprise.”

“Thanks,” the CRO says. “Sit, sit. Make yourselves comfortable.”

“We were getting ready to assess Ms. Hussein’s residential record,” Mendoza tells him.

“Right.” The CRO nods. “Hinton and I discussed this case at length yesterday. We were pleased to note that the mandated retention period has been completed, and all the Class A extensions have been served. It’s a fairly clean file.”

“My concern is the recent uptick of indiscipline, specifically the Class B last month.”

“Well, I think Hinton can be a little, shall we say, enthusiastic at times. He would be the first to admit it.” The CRO pauses, waits for a chuckle from Bradley.

Mendoza frowns. “But it shows—”

“It’s my professional opinion,” the CRO says, “that there’s no need for further retention.”

Sara watches, breathless. If this was his opinion, why did he not say anything before? Only after she has become an obstacle to the smooth running of his facility has he taken an interest in her case. She’s shocked he even knows her name; certainly it is the first time he has spoken it. Her gaze travels to the door again, where on the other side Toya is waiting for her own expedited hearing with Themis Legal Services.

“But how do we put it in?” Mendoza asks.

“We’ll do a TLS-78,” Bradley tells her, his voice taking on the condescension of an expert toward his young charge. “Release recommended due to inconclusive data.”

“That sounds suitable,” the CRO replies. “Thank you both for accommodating us on such short notice.”

Bradley gives a nod of acknowledgment. He is typing quickly on his screen, filling out Sara’s release papers, and submits the paperwork with a decisive tap. Then he raises his eyes to the clock, thinking ahead to the next hearing.

Is this really happening? Sara wonders, her pulse thrumming with anticipation. She’s waited months for this moment, but now that it has arrived she’s stunned by how it came to be. The CRO contrived to keep her and others here as long as possible, but now that she’s disturbing the peace at Madison he’s contriving to get her out. It seems so mechanistic, so baldly cruel, that she has trouble understanding it. But what the mind cannot comprehend, the heart has enough sense to feel. The rage she has bottled up comes unsealed, and before she realizes what she’s doing she cusses the CRO—a word so nasty it instantly brings color to Mendoza’s cheeks.

If he is surprised, the CRO doesn’t show it. He is pulling up a document on his own tablet, which he now hands to Sara. The document is only a paragraph long; it says that Sara releases Safe-X of legal, medical, and financial liability for the time she has spent at Madison. She also agrees not to disparage the company or its leaders in any form of communication, or take any action that could result in harm to its reputation.

An impossible choice, if it can even be called a choice. No matter what she decides, she has to leave people behind, her family or her friends, and carry the guilt of it with her forever. What should she do? The CRO is pressing the tablet into her hands, saying, “Here, sign right here,” and Bradley stands up, dusting off his jacket, ready to move on to Toya’s hearing.

Only Mendoza is waiting, with something like pity in her eyes.

This is it, Sara thinks.

She touches her finger to the screen—and she is free.

As she moves toward the exit, she finds Hinton waiting in the doorway, with a plastic bag in his hand. All the personal items she kept in her room are inside it, even her journal. “They’ll process you out in Room B,” Hinton says, pointing her down the hallway.

She takes the bag from him and turns away.

“Hope you had a pleasant stay with us,” he calls after her.