Cal had expected the Hotel to be dark inside, perhaps because the tall windows flanking the front door were draped in heavy curtains, to keep out the heat, he guessed. But he hadn’t accounted for the windows on the other side of the building. These had to be uncovered because the room they stepped into wasn’t bleak and cavernous but high ceilinged and striped with shafts of dusty light. This was a kind of lobby, though if there had ever been a desk for checking in guests, it had been removed long ago. Perhaps it had been disassembled for a Spike.
Aside from a few worn chairs and an empty bookshelf, the room was bare, its hardwood floor creaky and pocked. A carpeted staircase led to the upper floors, and on the landing a circular stained-glass window tinted the light green.
“Are you guys keeping this as an old-timey hotel?” Cal asked. “It still looks like one.”
The ceiling above them groaned. There had to be people upstairs.
Sailor shook his head. “There isn’t a concierge or anything.” He nodded toward the light at the back of the building, through a wide hallway. “Micah told me to take you into the dining room. I’m sure you guys are hungry.”
Cal was, and said so. Frida shrugged, her spine straight, her eyes bright as swimming fish. He couldn’t blame her for her shock, but it was starting to unnerve him.
Circular wooden tables filled the dining room, as did a variety of mismatched chairs: a delicate midcentury modern thing that resembled an insect, a few cheap metal ones that could be folded and stacked, even a leather recliner. A long, rectangular table had been pushed along one wall, probably for setting down vats of food for the dining guests. The room’s built-in shelves were crowded with trays of silverware and piles of plates, a few bulky towers of bowls, a congregation of motley glasses and mugs, and the occasional Mason jar.
It didn’t look like anyone had renovated this room. A papyrus of graffiti covered the peeling wallpaper, and in some places the wainscoting hung slack from mold. One of the large windows had been boarded up with the wood from a patio table: at its center, a perfect circle, for an umbrella, teased like a peephole.
“As I said, the rehab project was never finished,” Sailor said. “They ran out of cash.”
Cal imagined a velvet rope, cordoning off this back part of the building from tourists.
“It’s not that bad, though,” Sailor said.
Cal agreed. The other windows were intact and large—was it their light that had penetrated the lobby? Cal realized he was squinting. Even among this disrepair, dining with a sunrise or sunset had to make anyone feel lucky. The view outside was of the land beyond the main street; Micah and these people hadn’t settled past the Hotel, and so all Cal could make out was the wild of the woods. He suspected there was a stream or river that way, an easy water source for the residents.
Here, Cal felt so close to the open air, it was like he was standing on the ledge of a train car. He’d done that on the ride from Ohio to Plank; his mom had insisted he take a train to college. The ride was long, but he’d enjoyed the Styrofoam cups of instant coffee and the gnarled man who served them, and he loved to bite the edges of these cups, imprint them with his teeth as the landscape slipped across the window. Ohio was the ugliest, even more so than Nebraska. When he stood on the train ledge, the air had been so strong and rough on his arms, each moment swallowing the tracks beneath him, that he had trembled.
From the windows of the dining room, he could make out more Spikes in the distance. They drew a circle of protection around the Land.
Aside from the boarded window, the others looked to be holding up okay. Only one small pane was broken, and someone had repaired it by taping a Frisbee to the hole. The shoddy fix-it job reminded Cal of Plank. Micah had probably promoted that handyman.
In fact, the whole room reminded Cal of Plank’s dining room; it had the same buffet setup, the same disregard for aesthetics. This was probably what Plank looked like now. Had a group of settlers moved in since the school had shut down? He didn’t want that. If it couldn’t remain as it was, he wanted it to die.
A swinging door at the other end of the room opened, and Peter walked in with an olive-skinned woman who wore men’s boxer shorts over leggings. She held a large pot that appeared heavy by the way she flexed her arm muscles. Her tank top was tight against her ribs, and Cal tried to ignore the hard mounds of her nipples. Frida had told him that she and her friends used to put raisins in their bras so that boys would think them perpetually turned on, or cold, their skin brailled with goose bumps. He had never been sure if he should believe her, but now it seemed likely that Frida at fourteen would have wanted to look like this woman.
“This is Fatima,” Peter said. Fatima nodded a hello. When she lifted the pot onto the buffet table, he saw that her armpits were unshaved. He wondered if only certain residents were allowed to use the razors in the Bath or if Fatima simply chose not to.
Cal knew that Frida was looking at him, looking at Fatima.
“Where’s Micah?” she asked.