He loves a hotel room.
I love a hotel room. This is in my blood. Oasis in my Phoenician genes, way station in my ancient heart.
He returns to the bed and picks up the phone by the night-stand, first pulling out the tray at the base of the phone to study the information on the card there. He dials.
“Room service? Mr. Main in two-three-four-one. How late do you serve?…Excellent…No, nothing now, thank you. I may get hungry around three this morning.”
He dials a different number. “Is this the housekeeper?…Housekeeper, if I should want some laundry done, could you…What?…Oh, I want the valet, do I?”
“Valet? Have you same-day service?…What about dry cleaning?…Thank you very much, valet.”
“Message desk? Are there any messages for Mr. Main in two-three-four-one?…Yes, dear, would you please?…The red light? Where might that be?…Yes, I see it…No, it isn’t flashing. I thought it might be broken. Could you test it, please?…Yes, there it goes now. What’s the message?”
And the bar and the garage and the Avis desk. He makes inquiries about a baby sitter and calls the cashier and asks about cashing a check. He finds out, too, that he can leave his watch and valuables in the hotel safe.
Then he dials nine-nine. “Who,” he asks, “is the house doctor?…I see. Can you tell me anything about him?…Well, like where did he intern?…Could you find this information out and call me back? Or leave a message with the message desk? Or give me his room number and I’ll do it myself…Isn’t that nice, we’re on the same floor.”
He calls the doctor. The man has interned with the Sheraton chain.
And one last call. “Operator, this is Alexander Main in two-three-four-one. I want to leave a call for seven A.M.…Thank you. Goodnight to you, too, sweetheart.” It is not yet four in the afternoon.
He did not ring up for theater tickets or dial the florist. He didn’t call the hairdresser or ring 32 to request a Remington shaver or 64 to find out about an interpreter. He didn’t put a call through to rail and air reservations or to the hall porter to inquire about kenneling his pet. He never rang the secretarial service. But he was reassured that these services and others were available, that he sat in his room linked, hooked up as a President to his needs, oddly loved, certainly trusted, his cash and checkbook and cards like letters of credit to the world. He could have anything he wanted — carpenters to build him boxes, models from stores to show him new fashions, women, passport photographers, even locksmiths. He was totally self-contained, desert-islanded but not deserted, certainly not lonely, his options open, more dilated here than at home or at work or in the street. How silly of the hotel to call him its guest. His credit established he was something far more privileged and potent.
In this mood he showered, not bothering to close the stall, careless of the water he deflected against the mirrors and walls, of the puddles he made on the tiled floor. Private, possessed by his privacy. In this mood rubs himself dry with the enormous bath towel and leaves it crumpled in a heap beneath the sink, takes one by one the pins from his new pajamas, their odor of freshness like the smell of health, their new resins like a pollen of haberdash. He draws the drapes, touching them, feeling their heavy, opaque lining, pulling them so tight that it might be a half-hour beyond dusk instead of barely four o’clock. He goes to the door to leave his shoes in the corridor for the porter to polish, already anticipating the morning when he will hook them in like a croupier. He removes the bedspread, tosses it in a corner, feels the cool bleached sheets, white as letterhead, the soft blanket. He sleeps. I sleep. He dreams. I dream.
4.
He smells the gold before he sees it, a vague, involuntary pinch of nostrils, some pepper reflex. He feels the gold before he sees it, coarse-grained as the friction strip on a matchbook. He tastes the gold, warm, faintly curried, greasy as magnets, drawing his tongue like a poultice, carbonating his saliva. He hears the gold, its hum of precious engined molecules, its rare hiss just beyond range. It must be all around him. Its heaviness thickens the air, himself, stranding his stance, sucking at his legs and feet like ground beside a precipice.
He hears noises, hopes it is animals, knows it is men. No one has actually said anything. (It is this silence which is so minatory. Animals, forgetting themselves, would chatter.) He hears — what? Exploration. The silences presiding decision. Then a stone shoved against, the pressure of a shoulder against a wall, its resettling like elastic relaxing to its neutral length. Then taps, randomly scientific, reasoned, and shortly abandoned, a fury of the indiscriminate and something giving way, some rolled stone blossoming sesame; the source of the sounds abruptly shift, ventriloquized, higher, further off. But he takes no comfort from this, for if the noises are now more different, they are more regular too, the scuffle gone out of them, and he hears…footsteps. And their proximity again adjusts.
He knows where he is — in some payload of labyrinth, maze’s choice darkmeat like the eye of a hurricane — and that he is subterranean, in some architectonic cul-de-sac, an archipelago of walls and red-herringed ectopic space. He pictures the stone baffles and barricades, the inverted, earthen, conical screw of tunnel, wedges and bottlenecks and groins of space, all the false spurs, all the difficult dark. And through it all he hears them, now far, now near, unraveling the puzzle of place as if they were walking along a map, taking no confidence when momentarily he thinks he hears them where he has heard them moments before. Soon they are close enough for him to distinguish their tools, their levers and scrapers and mallets and spades, and to hear, too, in the aftermath of their progress, a queer dragged rustling. Then hears seals popping, stone scraped, wooden beams lifted and shoved back along grooves, some final hammering and the adjustment of stone tumblers in some huge lock. It is as if he hides in a hollow — the linchpin center, say, of a cube puzzle on a counter in a drugstore.
He sees their light before he sees them, refracted, rolling off the walls like a sand dune, breaking like a wave, caught, confirming as it comes the gold surfaces he had smelled, felt, tasted and heard before he had seen. He calls out, “Don’t hurt me. I’m your bondsman.” They keep coming. They are here.
In addition to the dish of blazing oil one of them carries, they have brought torches, and these they now ignite, planting them in standards already there. The torches mitigate the gloom, but it is the contents of the chamber which dispel it, laserizing the light, unfurling it like flags in wind and flinging down impression in a brilliant tattoo.