Page 8 of The Dream Hotel

T he laundry room is particularly dank this afternoon. It takes Sara a minute to adjust to the smell, but Toya is already at work, sorting through the mesh sacks in the wheeled cart. She acknowledges Sara with a nod. Though she isn’t much of a talker, Toya is full of interesting information on a wide range of subjects when she does speak. She knows how much a ten-year-old lightly driven Tesla is worth, or what it costs to replace a broken picture window, or how often a particular neighborhood floods, details she picked up in the course of a twenty-year career as an insurance claims adjuster. After the complex wildfire in Tujunga three years ago, she was put in charge of supervising claims verifications at Sanctuary Insurance, a huge responsibility that should have led to professional advancement, but she was agitating for a union and the promotion went to someone else—an oversight about which she’s still bitter.

Sara comes to stand next to Toya at the washers, helping her unpack the bags of white uniforms. Whoever decided on white wasn’t exactly concerned about practicality, Sara thinks; she has to pour two heaping scoops of company-approved whitening chemical over every load. On the other hand, white reinforces the idea that Madison isn’t a prison or a jail. In red or orange, the retainees might be perceived as dangerous inmates, the type that should be housed with convicted murderers or drug dealers. In brown or stripes, they might seem like petty thieves, shoplifters, or fraudsters.

But white affords other interpretations.

White is bland, sterile, therapeutic. White means their crimes can still be averted.

She brings more bags to the machines. Before her retention, she used to hate running the wash, but now the two afternoons a week when she’s assigned to the laundry room are her favorite; working with her hands allows her mind to roam free. Toya fiddles with the thermostat on the wall, trying to keep the laundry room cool. Even though the numbers on the screen decrease to 65 degrees, there’s no detectable change in the temperature. By the time the dryers are running, both women are sweating through their uniforms. Still, the steady thrum of the machines means they can have private conversations, which is almost impossible anywhere else at Madison. “I didn’t see you at breakfast,” Sara says.

“I was at the infirmary,” Toya replies. “Trying to refill my blood pressure medication again.” The last time she tried, Nurse Flores told her they had run out of the particular drug she needs. “I looked up a bunch of substitutes at the library.”

“That’s smart.”

“Desperate, more like. But I’ll take smart, too,” Toya says with a grin. The gap between her front teeth makes her look much younger. She spends her meager earnings on hair dye from the commissary; the curls that frame her face look charcoal black. Sara has never asked how old Toya is, because she’s come to suspect it’s a touchy subject.

“When’s your hearing?” Sara asks.

“Tuesday at 3:30.”

Twenty-two retainees have been released in the time Sara has been at Madison. Nearly all of them had hearings early in the morning, at 8 or 8:30. From this small dataset, everyone has drawn different conclusions. Some people think that RAA agents tend to be more lenient when they’ve just started their day. Others believe the retainees with early appointments were well rested first thing in the morning, which allowed them to perform better on their mental-status evaluations. Yet others think that the freed retainees made good impressions because they wore immaculate uniforms, compared with those who had to go straight from their work assignments in the kitchen or the yard to the interview room. Retention makes everyone superstitious. “I can cover for you,” Sara offers.

“They already told me I have to keep to my work schedule until it’s time for the hearing. But thanks, I appreciate it.”

Sara rubs her eyes. When she worked at the Getty she wore special glasses that protected against the blue lights of her computer screen, making it easier to sit at her desk for hours on end, looking at grainy photographs from the 1920s. By now, Jim Klass must have taken her name out of the office directory and assigned someone else to her project. These days it is Sara’s replacement who rides the tram up the hill, enjoying the views of the Santa Monica Mountains on a brisk fall morning, then steps out onto the still-empty Getty plaza, where the plash of a water fountain welcomes her into a day filled with art and beauty. What a life it was! Sara can’t believe she ever complained about the tram ride adding to her commute or about the cost of the caprese salad at the cafeteria or even about the tourists who periodically wandered into the research institute, looking for a bathroom. Then again, perhaps she has it wrong. Perhaps her retention presented the museum with an opportunity to cut down on the department’s budget by leaving her position unfilled.

Either way, the world moves on without her.

Now she opens the hardcover she borrowed from the library, a nonfiction book called When We Came Together: The Legacy of the WPA. Toya is reading a hard-boiled novel by Chester Himes. She flips through the pages and pulls out something that she slides across the table. “Happy birthday,” she says.

It’s a handmade bookmark, cut in the shape of photographic film. “I can’t believe you remembered!” Sara says, delight raising her voice to a higher pitch. “Thank you.” She holds up the bookmark to the light to admire it. “It looks so real. The perforations must’ve taken forever. Where’d you find the card stock?”

“Container for the laundry soap.”

“I love it,” Sara says. “Thanks so much.” She places the bookmark in her book.

A companionable silence falls between the two women as they read. The rest of the shift unfolds uneventfully, with only a minor interruption from Hinton, who makes a point of checking the laundry room while doing his rounds. Sara isn’t sure what he’s looking for; there’s no chance of illicit activity in a cramped room like this, which is equipped with cameras and has no back doors or hidden corners. But Hinton likes to be thorough.

—

After her laundry shift Sara forces herself to go to the exercise yard. Around the perimeter there are still traces of the school’s playground—markers where the monkey bars stood, a line on the wall that was used for handball practice, a pole from which a tetherball once hung. The breezeway still has handprint tiles, remnants of a kindergarten art project called There Is Only One Me. As late as thirty years ago, when keeping the school open wasn’t considered a fiscal liability for the district, the playground was filled with the joyful noise of children. Now it’s mostly quiet, even when dozens of retainees are out on break; they are under strict orders not to disrupt the work in the trailers that take up the northern side of the lawn.

She walks a couple of laps around the track, telling herself that this counts as exercise, then sits on a bench under the sun. Marcela is using the other end for a knee stretch. She’s a friendly girl, Marcela. It’s hard to believe there’s a restraining order against her.

The way Marcela tells it, her problems started when she reported her neighbors for running an unlicensed daycare. She objected to the business as a matter of principle, it was nothing personal. But after the city shut down the couple’s business and slapped them with a fine, Marcela started getting noise disturbance calls from the police whenever she rehearsed with her guitar or drums. On weekends, her neighbors blocked her garage door with their car, which was a problem because Marcela came home late from shows and was forced to circle the block each time, looking for street parking. So when they cut down her Japanese maple, she snapped and took a baseball bat to their fence. The footage of her on their doorbell camera allowed them to obtain a restraining order—and shot up her risk score. A few weeks later, while she was driving Sharp Jello’s band van, she was stopped for running a red light and was referred to the RAA. The violent dreams she was having about her neighbors landed her in retention.

With all the time she’s had at Madison, Sara has been thinking about her past, too, replaying one or another event that the algorithm could’ve used against her by giving it more significance than it deserved: a joke she made on social media in a heated moment, a fight she had over a parking space in a grocery-store lot, a ticket scan she skipped because she was in a rush to catch the Metro. At the time, she thought these incidents were trivial, if she thought about them at all, but they were recorded on smartphones, documented in screenshots, or watched from hidden security cameras, then stored in online databases. She can’t erase or escape her past: the incidents remain on OmniCloud, to be read, scored, and interpreted however the algorithm’s designers intended. We blame the algorithm for our predicament, she thinks, but the algorithm was written by people. That’s who put us at Madison. People, not machines.

Marcela sits on the bench. “Can I ask you something?”

Sara’s eyes dart to the sentry post under the breezeway, where Jackson sits, arms folded, the silver stripes on her shirt barely visible in the shade. She stays out of the sun as much as possible, on account of the vitiligo patches on her elbows, and that means she’s too far away to hear their conversation. The nearest Guardian camera is on top of the light pole, twenty feet away, but the hum of traffic from the highway must interfere with sound quality.

“You’re a professor, right?” Marcela asks.

“Not anymore,” Sara says, getting up and stretching her right leg. She doesn’t really need it, but it makes her look busy rather than friendly. Even without sound, she has learned, camera footage can convey unintended meaning.

“But you know how to write official letters,” Marcela insists. She leans forward. “Here’s the thing. I asked to have my guitar sent here, but they told me I had to write an official request and explain why I need it. Which is like, I don’t know, like asking me why I need air to breathe.”

Sara switches to the left leg. Sooner or later every retainee comes face-to-face with Safe-X bureaucracy. It’s a risky encounter, liable to lead you to break one rule while trying to follow another.

“So anyway. I wrote the damn petition, but they said I didn’t provide sufficient justification.” Marcela makes air quotes around sufficient justification. “And since you got your petition for the worship space approved, I was thinking, maybe you could help me write mine? It has to be a convincing petition. I really need my guitar. I need it.”

“They don’t care about that.”

After another cycle of stretches, Sara sits on the bench beside Marcela. The truth is that she wouldn’t mind helping with the letter, but she doesn’t know whether it’s against the rules to assist a fellow retainee with a petition. She has to check the handbook first. “Tell you what,” she whispers. “Let me think on it.”

—

Sara returns to the second floor, feeling worn out even though she hasn’t exerted herself all that much. It must be the monotony; her body finds it as exhausting as her mind does. This afternoon is particularly slow. Walking into 208, she finds her roommate working on her comic book. Emily spends all her money on pencils and paper, but she can’t afford colors, which is a source of continual frustration for her. She’s always telling Sara what shades of red or yellow she would have used if she had them, how much they would have added to the tone or depth of the work. The comic features a tightly clad mutant who fights supervillains using the firepower in her hands, which ignite at will and shoot flames from as far as a hundred feet away. Emily is a firefighter; she takes pride in the fact that her renderings of flames, and all the damage that a fire can cause, are realistic. Why a firefighter is writing a comic about a pyromaniac mutant, Sara hasn’t asked. Every woman needs private passions. Besides, Sara finds the sound of pencil on paper to be soothing.

Sara splashes cold water on her face, then sits on her cot, resting her back against the wall. Emily looks up from her drawing pad. “There’s a new girl,” she announces.

“Yeah, I met her this morning.”

“What’s she like?”

“I don’t really know. She didn’t say much.”

From where Sara is sitting, she can see Eisley in the hallway, standing at the door of 207, with her hand resting on the jamb. Does she have a question about the rules? No, it sounds like she’s asking where the television room is. “I think she’s doing okay.”

Sara goes back to her history of the WPA. The section she’s reading is about how the Federal Writers’ Project began to collect oral histories from thousands of former slaves. The narratives were recorded and edited in the 1930s by outsiders, a majority of them middle-class whites, yielding an archive that is both valuable and hopelessly limited in its ability to document how enslaved people survived under brutal predations. The chapter is engaging, but Sara has a harder time concentrating on the text as the afternoon device check approaches.

Finally the bell rings. Sara and her roommate step out into the hallway, joined a moment later by the women returning from the work trailers. This afternoon the attendant on duty is Yee, a younger guy with thick eyebrows who walks down the hallway in long, easy strides. As he makes the rounds with the scanner, he murmurs a polite thank-you each time a retainee’s neuroprosthetic beeps. Sara is amazed by his ability to maintain his good humor; compartmentalizing has never been her strong suit.

Once the neuroprosthetic scan is completed, Yee rattles off from a list on his tablet the names of those who have PostPal mail today, then turns around to leave.

“Yee,” Sara says, catching up to him. “You got anything for me?”

“Not today.”

She shifts on her feet, fighting the urge to snatch the PostPal tablet from him and check it herself. “You don’t have any mail for me, or a package maybe?”

“Nothing today. Were you expecting an email?”

“Yeah.” Never mind her birthday. It’s been nearly a month since she last heard from Elias, her calls and emails to him going unanswered. At first she thought he’d lost his phone, or that he was felled by a nasty cold, or that he was busy with a special project at work, but as the days turned into weeks, she’s had a harder time interpreting his silence, deciding whether it’s the benign reserve of a busy father or an early sign of estrangement. She’s starved for news of him, news of home.

His messages are the only chronicle she has of everything she’s missing while she’s at Madison. Last time he wrote, he told her that their homeowners’ association is giving him grief about taking in a paying roommate, saying he should’ve consulted with them and allowed them to vet the applicants. He’s finished child-proofing the kitchen cabinets, and secured the windows, too. The twins are walking, the twins can use spoons, the twins play with toy cars. He thinks they’re ready to start potty training because they wake up from their naps with clean diapers. Both of them are talking as well, saying words like cup and milk and papa.

As for Sara’s own papa, every letter he writes is a variation on the same themes: he urges her to eat well, exercise, and rest; to work hard and keep out of trouble; and to stay away from the other retainees in order to avoid any entanglements that might have legal ramifications for her case. The advice makes Sara cringe; her father has never encountered a problem he didn’t immediately try to solve through the application of personal effort. Responsibility—and its corollary, blame—were the principles on which he built his life and, after the passing of Sara’s mother a few years ago, he has grown even more committed to them. But although his messages never fail to trigger bouts of guilt, Sara still likes receiving them, likes knowing that she is being remembered. Especially on a day like this. “It’s, uh…I should be getting something today.”

Yee scrolls through the list on his tablet again, then shakes his head. “Nope, I don’t have you on here.”

“Thanks for checking.” A wave of disappointment washes over her as she walks back down the hallway, passing Emily on her way to the reading room.