He took up shifting residence in the Grand Cosmo, living in unrented courtyard dwellings, an unrented cottage in the wooded countryside of the eighteenth floor, an unrented room in the resort hotel on the fourth and fifth subterranean levels. He waited for the public to come. It was bound to come. It had always come. He rode the elevators, strolled through the Pleasure Park and the Palace of Wonders, bought a bag of cherries in the Moorish Bazaar and spat the pits into a stream beside an artful oak tree on the eighteenth floor. He sat in lobbies, tearooms, reading rooms, gardens with weathered marble statues, lecture halls, mossy glades, public parlors — sat listening to residents and visitors, speaking with staff, pondering improvements, observing the change of weather through many windows: gray skies and heavy snow, a sudden blue day, sheets of snow. He had been prepared to operate in the red, two years wasn’t uncommon, but the Grand Cosmo was losing too much too fast. On March 5, six months after opening day, he was summoned to a meeting of management in the executive suite on the second floor. The manager, backed by the head of accounting, who kept tapping the ball of a heavy finger against a thick sheaf of pages, urged him to drop his insistence on long-term leases. They were losing nearly thirty thousand a week — a ruinous rate. Irritably Martin agreed. That afternoon he instructed Harwinton to initiate a new campaign of four-color posters and half-page newspaper ads aimed at transient residents. Within a month the ads brought an increase in rentals to seventy-two percent of capacity, but during the spring and summer the numbers gradually diminished, despite new ads in weekly magazines. By September 5, the first anniversary of the Grand Cosmo, rentals had fallen to fifty-five percent of capacity — a rate that could only spell disaster. The manager told Martin that the Grand Cosmo seemed to confuse people — it didn’t appear to be the sort of place they wanted to check into for a few days on a quick trip to the city. And Martin could only agree, for after all the Grand Cosmo was not a hotel, not a hotel at all, but something quite different. One day in a small park on the twenty-third floor he overheard a woman say to a friend, “I simply love it here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. And you never have to go out, if you don’t want to,” to which her friend replied, “I love visiting here, Julie, but I could never stay, it’s too, it’s too—” “Yes?” the first woman asked, but already they were passing out of earshot along a leafstrewn path. Martin followed them through the deserted park but could hear only murmurs, laughter. For the next two days he brooded savagely over the unfinished sentence as if it contained the secret he had been looking for; one night it struck him that his search for the unspoken words was an acknowledgment that the Grand Cosmo was failing.
Martin strode through the floors of his inexhaustible building, searching for flaws, imagining new enticements. Was it the sense of the limitless that prevented people from flocking to the Grand Cosmo as they had to the Dressler? In the largest hotels, vast spaces were divided neatly into small, repeated rectangles — could the secret of such places be monotony itself? Did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand-new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness? Did the Dressler and the New Dressler flourish not because of their innovations, but precisely because they failed to depart very far from the familiar pattern of the good old family hotel?
It occurred to Martin that perhaps he was being punished for something. The punishment, if that’s what it was, struck him as entirely proper, though he wondered a little about the crime. Was he being punished for marrying Caroline and not Emmeline, the pretty sister and not the plain? He had married the sister in dream, the princess asleep in her tower, ignoring the living sister by his side. Was it because he too was a dreamer that he had been drawn to her then, five hundred years ago? She had never woken up. He had stopped trying. Perhaps he was being punished for not loving Caroline enough. Or was it for not desiring Emmeline in the first place? Was that his crime? Or was it the knock on the door of room number 7, on his wedding night? But maybe he was being punished for something much different. When his father grew angry he would harden himself, as if he were holding in an explosion. Was Martin being punished for not stepping carefully among the cigar boxes? Was that it? For surely the Grand Cosmo was an act of disobedience. Or was he being punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world? For of course only God and Harwinton could do that. Anyone else was bound to fail.
On the first Monday in December the head of accounting met with Martin to urge cuts in staff and the elimination of all inessential services. He further proposed that the six top floors be closed to residents and rented as business offices after a thorough renovation. Removing a bundle of papers from a leather case, he smoothed it over and over with the side of a hand and pushed it toward Martin, who sat down wearily in a chair, began to bend over the papers, and stood up with a curt refusal. He took the elevator down to the laundry, where he walked with his hands behind his back, soothed by the rumble of machines, the heat and steam of winding passageways. The next afternoon he found himself sitting in a public parlor on the twenty-sixth floor, looking at the first snow falling lightly. The lightly falling flakes of snow seemed the dust of vanished buildings; he understood that the Grand Cosmo was a commercial failure and would vanish like the Bellingham.
And again he strode through the floors of his building, but the doors, the walls, the lobby chairs, the artful gardens with their pools and statues, all turned as he watched the flakes of lightly falling snow. He remembered his ride with Emmeline to the building site of the Dressler, the man knocking his stick against the side of his snowy shoe, white ice on the black river: one by one the mansions of snow and ice would melt away, leaving no trace of what had once been there.
He came to the main lobby and sat down heavily in a corner chair. Behind the high windows snow was slanting down. One by one the Dressler, the New Dressler, and the Grand Cosmo would melt away, like the Bellingham before them. Marie Haskova had melted away, his marriage had melted away, Walter Dundee, Louise Hamilton, Bill Baer, gone, all gone. He would have liked to talk to Emmeline, but she too had melted away. And at the thought that Emmeline had melted away, a pity came over him, for poor Martin, lost in the falling snow. Poor Martin! He saw Emmeline standing beside his coffin, Caroline in a black veil looking coldly down. His face was calm in the coffin. He recognized that calm face. Tecumseh.
By the end of January it was clear that he would no longer be able to meet his payments. On the morning of February first he went over the figures with the head of accounting, consulted briefly with the manager, took a stroll along a forest path, and stepped into the brown dusk of the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store, where under the fierce gaze of an Indian who kept raising and lowering a tomahawk he purchased a first-rate Havana. He ran the cigar slowly under his nose and placed it in his jacket pocket as if he were saving it for a celebration. In the afternoon he canceled his account with Harwinton and informed the front office that the Grand Cosmo would no longer accept short-term guests. Only permanent residents who signed long-term leases would be admitted to the community of the Grand Cosmo. The general public would no longer be permitted to make use of the main lobby, of the ground-floor cafeterias and concessions, of the Moorish Bazaar and the winding aisles of the department store, but were to be excluded entirely from the domain of the Grand Cosmo. For the Grand Cosmo was not a tourist attraction or a hotel for transients, but a world within the world, rivaling the world; and whoever entered its walls had no further need of that other world.