Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

All those years running the Hotel Honolulu, and what had it come to? A rented bungalow in the woods of the North Shore. Rock happy.

"Write a horror book," Sweetie said. "Like Stephen King. He got bucks. And he hurt. You maybe take his place."

I just smiled at her and, as always, pondered her secret infidelities.

"Maybe they make it into one movie. Then you get more bucks."

"I've done that."

She had not known it. She was impressed.

"But I didn't keep the bucks."

"So what happen now?" Sweetie said.

"I'm waiting for a sign."

She understood that; it was how life was lived here. In Hawaii, we were small, like people on a raft. We lived on water, we watched the skies.

On that raft one day my daughter said, "Tell me a story, Daddy."

"I don't know any stories," I said. "Help me. Give me the first sentence."

"Once there was a man on an island," she began.

"He came from far away," I said.

"But what about the island?"

"It was a green island. He said, 'I want to stay here.' So he got a job at a hotel."

"What kind of hotel?"

"Very tall. Lots of stories."

"Tell me all of them," she said.

"Some of them are sad. Some are happy."

"All happy stories are the same," Rose said, wagging her head, pleased with herself. "But every unhappy story is different, unhappy in its own way."

I laughed and hugged her. "I wondered what happened to that book!"

With Rose's encouragement I renewed my old habit of seeing my life as something worth remembering and sharing. All the people I knew, their fortunes and their fate, were part of a bigger design, vivid and memorable because the hotel contained them — not specimens but souvenirs — part of my life.

When JFK Jr. got married, Sweetie had just laughed and said of his bride, "Such a howlie!" He died in a plane crash while I was writing my book — this book full of corpses — and Sweetie was inconsolable, like a sister, like a lover.

People elsewhere said how distant I was, and off the map, but no — they were far away, still groping onward. I was at last where I wanted to be. I had proved what I had always suspected, that even the crookedest journey is the way home.