Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“A bit.”

When it was light enough Rachel went downstairs to get takeout coffee at the general store across the road. On the way back she saw the charming owner standing on the steps. “Why did you choose to buy this hotel?” she asked. “There’s something magic here. It’s hard to explain.”

She didn’t tell him about the portal. Cool as he was, Berndt didn’t seem ready for that message.

He stood there vaping nicotine, looking thoughtful. “How do you write the ending?” he asked, instead of answering her question.

She thought of inviting Berndt to her writing workshop, promising they’d cover that, but he probably had hotelier paperwork to do. “This morning I woke up remembering a failed story,” she told him. “Sometimes I still want to go back and finish them.”

“See? Endings are hard.”

“Are they hard in songs too?” Esme asked. Berndt wrote beautiful songs when he could scrounge a little time for it.

“Yes. But in a song you can cheat and just reprise the chorus again.”

“The story takes place in a hotel, funnily enough. Maybe that’s why it’s the one I looked at when I couldn’t sleep. I never thought of that.”

Berndt, Rachel noticed, was also drinking takeout coffee from across the road.

He noticed her glance and looked sheepish. “I’d make coffee upstairs but what if the Norwegians are light sleepers? They pay my bills after all.”

Rachel nodded. “That’s what I thought too. You know, I’ve always wondered.”

“What?”

“Why is it called The Red Arcade Hotel?”

“It was called that when I bought it.” Berndt said. “No one could ever tell me why. It isn’t red and there are no arcades.”

“You’d think someone would know,” she said. “There’s always a history to these old buildings.”

“I know, right? Once I had a dream of red arcades, blind arcades on the outside of a building, cinder block like this one. But instead of being at the edge of the forest it was in an arid place by the sea, with a big windswept sandy yard.”

Ah. So the building did have a history but only in dreams. Maybe she could use that.

Never able to construct an ending to the hotel story that satisfied her, Rachel hadn’t been able to give it up either and had transferred it through decades and an entire succession of computers. She remembered where she had lived when she began the story. The apartment downstairs was empty; her friend had moved out and the new tenant hadn’t moved in yet. For some reason the door was unlocked. Her musician partner Adam was out of work and so Rachel would go downstairs to write.

Maybe she liked Berndt because he reminded her of Adam. Adam with only the good parts: the charm, the talent, the finger-picking. But because they weren’t involved, she could skip the bad parts. The drug abuse, the philandering, the financial drain. But maybe Berndt wouldn’t have been guilty of any of those things. Except the philandering, but he’d only do that with men. It wasn’t like he could pretend he didn’t like men. That was what people used to do, and it caused all sorts of problems. And if it was okay with her, then it wasn’t philandering.

She remembered how, on Saturday mornings, she’d force herself to stop on the second floor landing instead of going out to visit a friend or go to a café. She’d go into the apartment, empty except for one chair at the table, and slog away. There was a typewriter on the table, a Selectric with a spinning ball. You could buy spare spheres with different fonts. It seemed unthinkable now, to have physical fonts, but at the time Selectrics had seemed modern. Most typewriters back then were Courier, and that was the end of it.

Even though Rachel had struggled to stay in her chair, one of the things, other than the still unfinished hotel story she worked at that weekend, turned out better than she expected and eventually became part of a novel that she sold.

It was a good anecdote, Rachel told herself. Inspiring. Teachable. She ought to share it with her students later in the morning.

It was a different struggle now.

If she could somehow go back to that room, replete with colour and light and poetic descriptions. If she could retrieve both her stubbornness and her enchantment, maybe she could still write something good while she was here. She wanted to write for its own sake. She wanted to write something that felt like dipping a bucket into a well brimming with colours and secrets and raise it, ever so slowly, to the top.

Esme woke very early and swept the leaves in the sandy yard. Her sweeping was a going away present. It was so much harder for Margit without John and their daughter helping. The bus was due today, and Margit had told her this time the driver was coming right to the door. There were passengers with hotel reservations, more than there had been in a long time, and they didn’t want to drag their luggage through the potholes.

Her bag was packed and she had paid her bill. Esme was getting on the bus even though she hadn’t gone to Dream with Jeannie the fish-monger, hadn’t seen her aunt. Her blue dress stuck to her legs, her skin damp with sweat in the heat and now coated with a thin film of dust as well. The sand from the dunes was constantly blown across the highway by the itinerant winds.

Behind her the hotel stood, anomalous as though it was the last vestige of a town that had been razed by some catastrophe either environmental or perhaps spillover from an uprising. She had never questioned it, just as she had never questioned the hotel moving a few miles up and down the highway that everyone agreed it periodically did. Maybe the impossibility of it moving made its other oddnesses pale in comparison and so they were ignored. Why for instance did a three-storey hotel stand near a lonely crossroads with only a few scattered dwellings nearby? Why did the hotel have blind arcades on the east wall, painted and re-painted red long ago, much of the paint now scaled off by the sea wind?

Jeannie had told her she wouldn’t want to see Annielle, not the way she was now. And probably she shouldn’t even go to Dream. Reality wasn’t stable there, maybe even a side effect of Annielle’s madness, as though ripples of unreality spread out from her like waves from a stone thrown into a still pond. The fish in Dream was the best but Jeannie hardly went herself anymore. She was afraid she’d fall into a breach or get caught in a vortex and not be able to come back. The shredding was getting worse.

There had been other disappointments for Esme, including never speaking with Rachel. Esme felt the stranger was a lot like her; they were both drawn to this isolated hotel for reasons no one else would understand. She had hoped that one day Rachel would stop on the stairs and say hello.

This morning Rachel had sat with them and drunk coffee and eaten toast but she hadn’t spoken much, immersed in her screen. She had wavered a little as though she was only partly there. And Esme had once again felt too shy to start the conversation.

She went inside to rest. They’d all have lunch together at the makeshift dining table they’d set up in the lobby and covered with a red checkered oil cloth to hide the splits in the wood. They’d feast on fish from Jeannie’s last, and she said final, trip to the tip of the peninsula. Esme had gathered wild mint for tea, and there was grated carrot salad from the little garden in the back; carrots and peas liked the sandy soil.

On her way back upstairs she noticed a laptop on the table. The computer belonged to Rachel. Esme glanced around. There was no sign of Margit or Rachel. Esme gently opened the lid. There was text on the screen. It looked like a story or a memoir. Maybe Margit had told her Rachel was a writer. She couldn’t remember.