He stood for a moment, watching the snow settle upon her, watching her breaths condense and unfurl in the cold air. For a moment he forgot about the taxi waiting in the parking lot, and he forgot about the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel. He forgot their miserable endless journey, and the illness that had left her gaunt and mean. She had rested her head against the wall of the station house, and the lamplight reflected softly off the snow, and like a gentle hand it caressed her face and restored to it a beauty her illness had completely eroded. He forgot everything and for a moment remembered only his love for her, and, by remembering it so keenly, he felt it once again, it flooded him, and he could not contain it, this sudden overwhelming feeling of love, it rose out of him in tears, and he dropped to his knees before her.
The lobby of the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel was dark and seemed cavernous, because its walls could not be discerned in the gloom. They had to cross a vast field of intricately and endlessly patterned carpet in order to arrive at the reception desk, which stood like an altar at the far side of the huge room, opposite the revolving entrance doors. A young woman, wearing an official-looking uniform, stood behind the high wooden counter, on which perched two huge bronze gryphons, each holding a stained-glass iron lantern in its beak. The woman stood rigidly between the two lamps, staring placidly in front of her. She seemed as eerily inanimate as the creatures that flanked her.
It was the final leg of their journey, this trip across the oceanic expanse of lobby. The man and the woman waded through little islands of furniture—club chairs reefed around low circular wooden tables.
It was only when they were standing directly in front of the reception counter that the woman behind it lowered her gaze from the dimness above them all and seemed at last to see the two weary travelers who stood before her.
Welcome to the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel, she said. She did not smile.
Thank you, the man said. We have a reservation.
Your name?
He told the woman his name.
Ah yes, she said. We’ve been expecting you. Did you have a pleasant journey?
It’s been a difficult journey, the man said.
It often is, the woman behind the desk allowed. Your passports?
The man handed these over and they were duly scrutinized and returned. Then the woman turned around and contemplated a huge warren of cubbyholes, each containing an enormous key. She reached her arm up and plucked a key from one of the highest cells. She turned back to them and laid the large iron key, which was affixed to a heavy tasseled medallion, on the counter.
Five nineteen, she said. Your room may be chilly, but if you open the radiators it should warm up quickly. The bellboy is away at the moment, but if you leave your bags, he will bring them up to you later.
I think I can manage them, said the man.
The woman behind the counter said, The bar is open all night. She pointed toward the far end of the vast lobby, where a faint red light shone through a curtain of glass beads. But I am afraid the kitchen is closed.
There’s no food? the man asked.
I’m afraid not. Well, perhaps something inconsequential in the bar.
I just want to go to bed, the woman said. Let’s go.
You’re not hungry? he asked.
I just want to go to bed, she repeated, enunciating each word emphatically, as if it were she who was communicating in a second language, not the woman behind the counter.
The man sighed and lifted the heavy key off the counter and picked up their bags. In an apse behind the reception desk a grand staircase wound up through the dark heart of the building, and a small wire-caged elevator hung from cables in its center. The man opened the outer and inner gates. There was just enough room for the man, the woman, and their bags in the tiny cage, and the limited space forced them to stand so close to each other they almost touched. Their room was on the top floor—the fifth—and each landing they passed flung a skein of pale golden light through the intricately wrought bars of the elevator, so that a delicate pattern of shadow bloomed and faded, again and again and again and again, across their faces.
Surprisingly, the dark gloomy grandeur of the hotel did not extend into their room, which was large and sparsely furnished. The walls were paneled with sheets of fake plastic brick and the floor was covered with a gold shag rug that crunched disconcertingly beneath their feet. The room was, as the receptionist had predicted, very cold.
The woman dropped the bags she was carrying and sat upon the bed. She sat rather stiffly, staring intently at the faux-brick wall.
The man watched her for a moment, and said, How are you feeling?
She turned away from the wall and lay back upon the bed, gazing now at the ceiling. Fine, she said, given that I’m dying.
But we’re here, he said. Doesn’t that count for something?
After a moment she said, Do you want me to live?
What? he asked. Of course I do.
Do you?
Yes, he said.
I think if I were you I wouldn’t, she said.
Of course I do, he repeated.
I think I’d want me to die, she said. If I were you.
I want you to get better, he said. To live.
Perhaps you really do, she said. But it seems odd to me. I know what I’ve become. How I am. What I am.
He sat beside her on the bed and tried to hold her, bend her close to him, but her body remained stiffly upright. He stroked her arm, which felt as thin as a bone beneath her layers of clothing.
Of course you’re the way you are, he said. Anyone would be that way, under the circumstances. But if you recover, you won’t be.
But what if I don’t?
Don’t what?
Don’t recover. Or what if I recover my health, but don’t recover my—I don’t know. You know: myself. My joie de vivre. She gave a hollow laugh.
Of course you will, he said. How could you not?
I think it might be gone, she said. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to be like this.
You’re exhausted, he said. But we’ve made it. We’re here.
I don’t feel it yet, she said. Do you feel it?
Yes.
Perhaps if I take a bath. That always changes things, doesn’t it? At least for me it does.
The woman got up from the bed and opened the bathroom door. She turned on the light. The bathroom was very large and very pink. The ceramic toilet and sink were pink, as was the large bathtub, and all the floor and all the walls were tiled with pink tiles. Even the ceiling was tiled pink.
What a lovely pink bathroom, she said. And look at that enormous tub.
You can have a nice bath in that, said the man. A nice hot long bath.
Yes, the woman said. A nice hot long pink bath. She smiled at him, a real smile. She entered the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
The man crossed the large crunching field of carpet and knelt beside the radiator. Praying, he turned the knob. It stuck for a moment and then released itself, and a spire of steam gushed out of the ancient Bakelite valve, like the smoke from a train engine in a silent movie. The coiled intestines of the radiator liquidly rumbled like the bowels of a person about to be sick. He placed his hand against the roughened rusty skin and felt it slowly warm to his touch. He kept his hand there until it burned.
He stood up and moved around the perimeter of the room, closing the curtains across the dark freezing windows, and then he turned on both bedside lamps, which wore little pink silk bonnets. He walked back over to the door and shut off the calcifying overhead light, and the room looked almost warm, almost cozy. He sat back upon the bed, which was covered by a quilted spread of slippery golden fabric, and listened for his wife in the bathroom, hoping to intuit from whatever he heard some clue as to how she was, but he heard nothing. After what seemed like a very long time the door open and she emerged, wearing only the long silk underwear they had both layered beneath their clothes ever since arriving in this cold country. She had pulled her damp hair back and gathered it into a ponytail. Her hair had grown in much thicker than it had ever been before the chemotherapy—the only good the poison did, she claimed. She looked very clean and fresh, flushed and almost healthy.