A Time Displaced Hotel
No one seems to agree on when the Hotel was built, though this is rarely discussed aloud.
Yesterday afternoon, a woman in mourning black asked if the electric lights were new. She spoke carefully, as if the word electric itself was experimental. At nearly the same moment, a man in a velvet suit—cut narrow at the waist, confident in the way only the 1950s ever seemed to manage, complained that the lift music was out of fashion. Neither appeared surprised by the other.
The desk has learned not to ask when guests have come from. It is enough to simply note the arrival.
Some check in carrying trunks with brass corners worn smooth by hands long gone. Others travel light, pockets full of objects that have not yet earned names. They queue politely. They wait their turn. Time, whatever it is elsewhere, behaves itself here.
A guest once asked if the Hotel was a kind of machine. The concierge pretended not to hear and slid the register across the counter. Ink, after all, works the same in every era.
Rooms are assigned without comment. Corridors accommodate everyone equally. The carpets remember footsteps better than dates.
By evening, the woman in black had retired early with a pot of darjeeling. The man in velvet lingered by the Montgomery Sister’s bar, convinced he had been there before, though not recently. Later, a guest paused outside Room 144, uncertain why the corridor smelled of coal smoke and violet powder at the same time.
—Filed by Housekeeping