into the foyer, up cascading stairways and down the long blue corridors into the first room which is the Room of the Lost Home. This is an unostentatious room. It’s plain, almost barren except for purely functional furniture; but as the silver gondola slowly glides through, Doc and the boy will note — as they’ll note with the twelve other rooms to come — how from different perspectives the room takes on a different appearance. In the natural course of things, loss of home is the easiest to bear, particularly if it’s the voluntary loss that comes with growing up. Only from the far corner of the room
as I, wandering nakedly aimlessly up and down the stairs of the house that was
does the room’s loneliness give way to desolation and then terror, not only the walls and beams of the room but all light and warmth falling away, when the loss is an act of catastrophe or when the room suddenly opens up into the adjoining room that is the Room of Lost Livelihood. This includes a small sitting room of Lost Fortune, not as impressive as the Room of Lost Livelihood that’s more spacious because it must encompass the loss of not only past fortune but prospective fortune as well. The sitting room of Lost Fortune, however, does have a nice big window for jumping purposes. The Room of Lost Livelihood is plush with overstuffed sofas and high-armed chairs to remind those who pass through of a graciousness of living they’ll never attain. From the gondola Doc notes, however, that there’s nothing practical about this room, there aren’t even bare necessities, just promises that shimmer enticingly before disappearing, like the vanishing walls and light and warmth of the Room of the Lost Home.
These are the first and last rooms that will manifest themselves so materially, as is this corridor down which the gondola now sails. As terrible as
stacked against the hillside, smelling through the open windows the nearby
these rooms can be, their dim e n s i ons remain very concrete; from here on, the rooms into which Doc and the boy sail in their gondola have no truly fixed dimensions. Their terror is, in varying degrees, as profound as it sometimes is illusory. The most shape-changing of all is the Room of Lost Love. Here in the Hotel of Thirteen Losses this is the most chameleon of rooms. It reflects more the nature of the guest passing through than the nature of the loss itself, because this loss has no true nature of its own. This room is a bombardment of hallucinations, which isn’t to say the hallucinations aren’t truly devastating, because they’re revelations of the self, a rave of the id: when Doc first sails into this room it’s nothing but a massive fireplace, with a roaring fire; suddenly the fire is gone and the hearth
eucalyptus and smoke, standing for hours in the large windows overlooking a
becomes the cold slab of a grave. The Room of Lost Love is never stationary. It isn’t to be found in any one permanent location of the hotel; it moves from floor to floor, from the beginning of one hallway to the end of another, from the penthouse to the basement. As the gondola sails through, the room may tend to settle, its mercurial torments exhausted; when one has sailed far and deep enough into the room’s recesses, it may lose all ephemerality and transform to a different space altogether that’s both the same room but a different room, which is the Room of the Lost Mate, utterly uninhabitable for some and a way station of sorts for others. As the gondola leaves the Room of Lost Love, it remains to be seen whether it will sail out the same door it sailed in or an altogether different exit. Something melancholy grips Doc on her voyage through this room, and she realizes that this is the only loss that someone might envy if she’s never known it; there is, then, perfectly contained within the Room of Lost Love another room with no walls at all that’s the Room of the Loss of Lost Love — the loss of never having had the experience of losing love. Leaving the Room of Lost Love, Doc’s gondola sails into a huge ballroom or, in fact, three ballrooms that are conjoined as one. These are the Ballroom of Lost Faith, the Ballroom of Lost Dignity and the Ballroom of the Lost Soul. It would be difficult to tell where one finishes and one starts; the conjoined ballrooms are mirrored from one end to the other and the chandeliers that hang from
strange city I didn’t know and the panorama of strange little houses and
the ballroom ceiling glitter not only in the mirrors and the mirrors’ reflections of each other but off the water and off Doc’s silver gondola, so that the cumulative light is blinding. Thus all perceptions are refracted, dazzled, suspect. What seems to be lost faith may be a failure of will or nerve. What seems to be lost dignity may be wounded pride or ego. And at the far end of the ballroom, where tides flow in from all other rooms of the hotel and collide, and it’s all the boy can do to right the gondola’s course, it’s often impossible to know which transgressions of behavior, integrity and conscience will drag the soul down into the undertow of the irredeemable.
So from out of the Three Ball rooms, Doc’s silver gondola is drawn into two small, tran si tion al rooms linked together that, from here, provide the only passage on to the rest of the hotel.
The first transitional room is the Room of Lost Youth and the second is the Room of the Lost Parent. Because both are rooms in which the traveler learns her earliest,
strange little trees and strange little cars driving up strange winding streetlit
most significant lessons in mortality, at first they appear to Doc to be the same. In both, all the furniture has been covered with sheets as on moving day — but the sheets are black rather than white, and gauzy and transparent, so the outline of the furniture beneath them can always be seen. There are two differences between the rooms: in the Room of Lost Youth there’s a crack in the corner of one wall through which a gale blows, disheveling the sheets on the furniture so that sometimes the Room of Lost Youth might take the form of the Room of Lost Health, for instance, or the Room of Lost Promise — which is to say one might enter the Room of Lost Youth early in life or late, age isn’t a factor, no one checks for identification at the door. It’s the same with the Room of the Lost Parent, which may also be either one of the first or last rooms in
roads that seemed to drop off in midair, not finding it so disconcerting, even
the hotel one passes through; it’s even possible to be born in the Room of the Lost Parent. The other difference between the two rooms is that in the Room of Lost Youth, a pillar stands in the center from floor to ceiling, while in the Room of the Lost Parent the pillar is gone, although its shadow remains both night and day cast by no apparent light across the length of the room and always leaving the exit on the other side in darkness. But there is a navigable exit, after all; a guest adjusts to her stay in these rooms and sooner or later leaves, the losses endured if always felt.
Having sailed through these transitional rooms, then Doc’s gondola emerges in the hotel’s lavish mezzanine. All this time, sailing through the Hotel of Thirteen Losses, Doc and the boy navigating the boat have followed a very distant melody made only more obscure by the oceanic symphony that plays it. Doc recognizes it. Even faint as it is she can barely stand to hear it again, even as she knows that it’s for this melody she’s come here. Now in the hotel’s lavish mezzanine the song is louder; other than a single small door at the far end of the mezzanine that leads to either some sort of closet or pantry, before the gondola are three sets of double-doors to three separate suites and Doc knows it’s from one of these suites the song comes. She knows she’s closer