But Esme didn’t say. She knew how people talked, probably now more than ever.
Maybe if Rachel had written her aunt’s name, Annielle would still be sane. Esme ran upstairs and pounded on her door.
Rachel opened it. She looked more solid, as though she’d brought more of herself across.
“You must write Annielle being well. Only you can do it. You must write the rifts in the fabric of reality closed.”
Rachel looked honestly puzzled. “You should say tears in the fabric. It can’t be a rift in fabric. A rift can appear in the clouds or the continental shelf or a relationship, but not in fabric.”
Esme stared at her. Rachel didn’t know the power she held in her hands.
But at least this time she saw her. Often she didn’t, passing Esme on the stairs or ignoring her at breakfast as if she didn’t exist. “Take me back with you,” Esme said. “I need to see what your world is like. You have access to my world but I can’t go to The Red Arcade.” Esme felt slipshod and no-account in comparison, but maybe it was like music. Maybe if you were tone deaf no matter how much you practised you’d never be more than a mediocre singer.
“I don’t know if I can take you back but we can try,” Rachel said.
“After lunch. You’ll come to lunch, won’t you?”
She went back downstairs to help Margit cook. She knew she wouldn’t get on the bus back north because everything had changed. It was a heartbreak, but to be a character in a stranger’s story was so much better than not existing at all.
There was the mahi-mahi Jeannie had brought from Dream, and sautéed wild greens all three had gathered together early in the morning. Margit had discovered three dusty bottles of white wine in the back of the pantry.
“Yuck,” Esme said. “Remember how it used to make Annielle throw up?”
“She was just allergic. And maybe ten years have improved it. I don’t have anything else. I don’t drink anymore.”
When she heard the bus pull in Esme went out to meet it.
“Did you go to Dream yet?” the driver asked, opening the door.
“No, I didn’t.” She stepped aside so everyone could get out.
“I thought that’s why you came,” he said. “I thought you needed to go to Dream and see Annielle.”
“You said her name. I wasn’t sure you knew it.”
He opened the baggage compartment for the passengers before he replied. “Everyone knows it. Even if we don’t know her, we know her name.”
“Everyone says she is really crazy now and that it would hurt me to see her.”
“We should go in and have lunch,” the driver said. “We can talk more then.”
Esme’s broom was lying on the ground beside the door. She picked it up and propped it against the side of the building, in the corner of an arcade. The passengers followed them inside. One dreadlocked young man with only a knapsack had preceded them and was already seated at the table.
Margit hugged the driver. “It’s so nice that you came all the way. I’m so sorry.”
“But why?”
“John isn’t here. He passed on two years ago.”
He shrugged. “We must go on, all of us.”
“I need to check people in.” Margit held the door open for the stragglers. “I haven’t got any staff, I’m sorry.”
“We’ll eat first,” Esme said, showing the guests to the table. “Everyone’s starving.”
The young man’s guidebook was propped open on the oil cloth in front of him.
“In the future,” he said, “Lonely Planet will include listings of destinations in other dimensions.”
Esme nodded, wondering where he was from. The past or the future, here or there? In one way it didn’t even matter. Maybe that’s what staying here taught you.
Rachel hadn’t come to lunch and Esme ran up the stairs again to knock. The door was ajar and Esme, presumptuously, poked her head in. The bed was rumpled but there was no one in it. The stranger had snuck out for a walk or she had disappeared, sucked back to her home world.
When Esme rejoined the others the driver poured her wine she sipped at desultorily and asked her where she’d been.
“There is a woman,” she said. “Every day she passes me on the stairs. She’s carrying a computer. She uses it to write. At first I thought she was real, but then Margit told me she’s not. I mean, she is, but she’s not real here. She is working on a story. And, it’s about me. So, I worry. Do I only exist because she is writing me? I wanted desperately to talk to her even before I found out, I wasn’t sure why. And now, I am afraid. If I go back to the city, she might forget about me. She might stop writing about me. And then…”
“Very Chuang Tzu,” the young man said.
“But what if it’s the opposite?” the driver asked. “What if it’s we who are the originals, the writers, and she is the character. What if you are writing her writing you?”
“Maybe,” Esme said. “But it’s one of the reasons I’m not getting on the return bus tomorrow. Maybe next week. Rachel is looking for an ending, she said in her notes. She has worked on this story for decades and she is tired of it. But she doesn’t understand. If she walks away from the story, or even if she finds an ending, then we will all die. We only live because she writes.”
“You don’t know that,” the young man said.
“Be careful,” Margit said. “You sound like her.”
“Rachel?” Esme asked.
“No. Annielle before she left for Dream.”
“I wouldn’t be afraid to go to find my aunt if I didn’t have to go alone.”
“But maybe if you go to find Annielle we will all die. Isn’t there another possible ending?” the driver asked.
Every morning after breakfast they would read their work and share notes at a big table Berndt had set up in the cavernous bar and covered with a red cloth. On the way downstairs Rachel passed a tall blonde in a blue floral dress and frayed straw hat.
She must have just checked in, Rachel told herself. I’ve never seen her here before.
Then the woman wavered a little, and Rachel could see through her. Which was weird enough, but she also seemed incredibly familiar.
Even though vaping was legal indoors, Berndt couldn’t break the habit of smoking outside. He liked standing on the little concrete porch to see who was coming and going in his town.
She told him about the apparition. “Are there ghosts here?” she asked.
Berndt said, “I’ve never heard of one. But you’ve been working hard and you haven’t been sleeping well.”
“How do you know?”
“People in the three-twenty club can all hear each other in the halls, back and forth, to and fro from the bathroom. My guess is the ghostly woman is somehow a part of you.”
“Busted about the three-twenty club,” Rachel laughed. “But I don’t think she’s a projection or an alter ego. While indistinct she was definitely exterior, not in my mind’s eye. And she seemed familiar.”
Berndt said, “Do you know Ursula LeGuin wrote about Lao Tzu and translated him? She said he was an anarchist. You can’t keep working on your hotel story and you can’t end it either. You’ve told me this more than once. This woman is the key, I’m sure of it.”
“That’s interesting but it doesn’t help me understand what just happened.”
“It’s just a feeling I have, that she is the clue to your ending. Just a feeling, but a strong one. ”
“Maybe it’s the crystals, I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I forgot my laptop upstairs.”
“Really?” Berndt raised a gently mocking eyebrow. “How could you forget a thing like that?”
They went back inside. Climbing the stairs to get her computer Rachel noticed the grime more than usual. She opened her door with a key, not a card, and instead of her pokey room she was in a big panelled corner room full of light. She crossed the room to look out one of the windows set into the red-painted walls. It looked out at a fenced field where skinny horses stood munching grass. Really their corral was just posts driven into a dune.