The hotel is made of a hundred thousand living bones. That is an estimate. The exact number fluctuates as new cartilage fuses together and old skeletons wear to dust. Children try to count, running their hands over the great vaulted spines of the lobby and the thin knucklebones of the window jambs. When they give up, flopping into a cushioned fibula alcove, the hotel’s caretaker will ask them how many, and the kids will shout, “Ten million!” She will nod and say that sounds about right.
Sheryl has maintained the hotel for forty-seven years. The hotel likes Sheryl. She comes early each morning and sips tea at the continental breakfast, where prepackaged pastries spill out of the cavities of skulls. As guests wander through the buffet, she welcomes each one, passing on a greeting that the hotel cannot communicate on its own.
Though Sheryl lives in a boneless house on the opposite end of the town, the hotel is her home. (The hotel doesn’t know how to be a home.) She says she imagines being buried here, her spent bones nestled beneath its breathing ones. The change would be minimal. There’d be no tea in the morning. She’d miss the tea.
Each day, Sheryl reads the booking system out to the hotel—full names, hometowns, which guests sounded nice on the phone, and which ones she thinks will demand three changes of towels without saying thank you. When she’s patient, she’ll read the hotel their entire file, all the credit card numbers and emergency contacts and whether their phone’s area codes match their addresses. The hotel likes this information, though it doesn’t know what to do with it.
But today Sheryl looks at the booking in room three and says only, “Her name is Annalie. Don’t worry about her. She’ll be gone in two days.”
This worries the hotel. The hotel doesn’t like mysteries. It doesn’t like a blank space where information should be. It pesters Sheryl with a cacophony of creaking joints, following her wherever she works. While she labors, the hotel turns all the faucets on in the bathroom, which makes her complain about the water bills. It shuts her in the room her until she sits down, listening to the water running and the hotel’s bones groaning, and says, “Annalie is my granddaughter, you satisfied now? Don’t ask me anymore about it—I’ve never met her. Now let me out so I can do my job.”
The hotel opens the door, unsatisfied with the explanation.
•••
Annalie wheels her suitcase over planks of flat sternums. She does not check in, for the hotel anticipates everyone’s arrival. It opens their doors, and makes their beds, and absorbs every detail in their snippets of conversation.
Through their stories, the hotel constructs a model of an outside world it will never see. Of buildings made of stucco and steel. Of streets crowded with so many skeletons that they push past each other, incurious about the lives they so briefly bounce off of. This background chatter, the passing words of transitory guests, is all the hotel craves.
Or rather, it is all the hotel demands. Sheryl has it written into the terms of agreement. She calls it a contract, but it is more a warning that the hotel will extract, through its own means, stories from each of its visitors. Most guests do not read the notice and assume the small fee covering plumbing, electricity, and upkeep is all the payment they will make. Most leave without learning otherwise, having talked of their lives over breakfast, reminisced by the jointed windows, or made passing small talk in the cavernous halls. They speak, unaware that the hotel is listening and procuring its fee. The hotel prefers this system—debts assumed and debts repaid without knowledge of the exchange. It then opens its front doors again and watches each visitor leave. It prefers that too, to unlock the doors at the end of each stay. To do otherwise is uncourteous.
And the hotel cherishes all its occupants. It delights in the noisy breakfast hall where it can learn of cities that grow tall or die in flames, of night skies alight with colors and deep oceans of unfamiliar lives.
(And some days it longs for the soft tissues of its visitors. For muscles that could lift itself out of the dirt and transport itself to new cities and countries and continents. For a body that could sip Spanish wine on the sidewalk and unearth iridescent beetles in the Amazon.)
•••
Annalie arrives alone, and solo travelers are the hardest to decipher. They have no one to turn to and say, “Remember that trip to Tokyo? The cherry blossoms in the spring?” The hotel tilts the bones of the floor, creating just enough incline for Annalie’s suitcase to roll into a young man sitting beside the fireplace. It learned this trick years ago, the manipulating of two humans into the same space until one asks, “So, where are you from?” But Annalie snatches her runaway suitcase, mutters a brief apology, and moves away before the man can pry any secrets out of her.
She has a photo of Sheryl on her phone, which she looks at, then scans the room, then references the photo once again. The hotel loves photos, static glimpses of an outside world, and this one shows Sheryl years before she wandered into its skeleton. She is holding a child, a young boy who she has never mentioned, and stands beside a man the hotel has never seen. Annalie spots the caretaker watering ferns in the lobby, but upon making eye contact, Sheryl moves to cleaning an unoccupied room, shutting the door between them. Annalie walks up to the closed door, clenches her fingernails into her palm, then ensconces herself in her own room. (She does not ask the hotel to open Sheryl’s door, as it is not her room to enter. But the hotel would have opened it for her.)
The hotel’s spinal column branches into twelve rooms, each with king-sized beds and plumbing that no longer secretes blood. (The visitors didn’t like that. And though the hotel thinks the blood born of its marrow is a life-giving thing, it respects its guests’ wishes and keeps its creation out of the carpets and water supply.) The tourism guides resting in the cranial cavities of the bedside tables list little more than a local Denny’s and a decrepit miniature golf course, but travelers shamble in from across the world just to live for a night in someone else’s bones. They probe the insides of the hotel with camera lenses and carry memories home of draperies hung over wrist bones which pull themselves shut at night and doors of interlocking vertebrae that separate at the presence of an admitted traveler.
But Annalie does not marvel at the long humerus bones framing the eastern view of the lake. She scrunches her face at her skeletal bed when she thinks no one is watching (the hotel is watching) and sleeps through most of the day. The hotel, always gracious, switches off the lights. But it mourns the silence and the lost hours it could have spent puzzling out this newcomer. It aches to raise the left femurs of the bedframe so the woman falls out of the sheets and down into the halls where she will speak of her home, of the bones that live alongside her, of the children and grandchildren that Sheryl hid from the hotel by omitting information that she, among all else, should know the hotel needs. Instead, it lets Annalie sleep, and it craves. All guests have stories, but Annalie has answers.
•••
Sheryl is the hotel’s only constant presence. She washes dishes, fixes pipes, and scrubs all the corners that the hotel’s phalanges cannot reach. They’ve lived in each other’s company for enough years to develop a shared language. She has never spoken of a family. The hotel accepts that it will never learn every facet of the human lives that pass through its doors. It does not accept this about Sheryl.
The hotel greets its caretaker, angling its bones in a subtle pathway to where Annalie sits alone at a breakfast table.
“No, no, not now,” Sheryl says. “The dishes are piling up.”
With the tilt of a rib, an unwashed mug rolls off the counter and onto the floor and a dozen bones guide it to the foot of Annalie’s chair.
“You’ll be the death of me,” Sheryl says, and the hotel disagrees.
Annalie picks the dehydrated fruit out of her continental breakfast muffin. “Hi, Grandma. I was wondering when I’d get to see you.”
“Oh, I’m just picking up—”
The mug rolls to the opposite side of the table.
“Please talk to me?” says Annalie. She has Sheryl’s cheekbones.
As the hotel waits, the other guests’ chatter, so rich with information and details of their unshackled movements, becomes meaningless. It listens to hear Annalie, and hopes she will say, “My father, your son, lives in a home smelling of pine needles and ground pepper. When he smiles, his dimples curl in the same shape as the ringlet of hair draping over his brow. When he speaks of his childhood with you, his voice has the timbre of a quarter dropped on a wooden table.”
Instead, Annalie bites her lower lip and tells Sheryl, “I came here to find you, even though my father and grandfather think you’ll never return. We need you to come home.”
The hotel does not allow Sheryl to answer (strange and unfamiliar, to not want an answer). It spills scrambled eggs across the sternum buffet table, beckoning her to clean its mess, so she says, “We’ll talk about this later.”
•••
Annalie walks out of the hotel while the hotel watches (opens the doors for her, shifts the shoulder joints of the dining chair so that her raincoat drops to the floor and she remembers to take it with her). She leaves her empty plate on the table, assuming a hotel which opens doors can also wash dishes. The basin tabletop, formed by a wide pelvis, lacks the joints and mobility for such a task, but Sheryl removes the dishes. She sweeps the crumbs gathered at the center of the bone, knowing they irritate its compact tissue.
Sheryl talks while she works, divulging a stream of life’s banalities to the hotel. She’s planted new tulips for the spring. A neighbor dropped off homemade bread. The stray cat that begs for food at her door let her pet him for the first time. Though her stories lack the intrigue of distant tales from faraway visitors, the hotel finds itself tuned to the reverberations of Sheryl’s voice.
The hotel flexes its tibia countertops in an approximation of a whine until Sheryl returns to the important topic. “I told you not to worry about Annalie,” she says. “She’ll be gone as quickly as she got here, and I’ll stay. As always.”
The ribbed cabinet doors protest.
“I don’t know her. I came here soon after my son married, and after I left, no one wanted anything to do with me. “
When the hotel tries to demand further explanation, Sheryl shuts the whining cabinet door.
“And don’t you try to pry more information out of her. She’s a guest, you treat her well and let her go. Nothing else.”
But all guests owe their stories. This is the hotel’s due.
•••
Annalie returns, coat speckled with light rain, and asks Sheryl to sit. She attempts an excuse, but the hotel heats the water kettle until it whistles, and Sheryl pours herself and Annalie a cup of tea.
“My father says you found this hotel and left us for it,” says Annalie. “I had to pry that out of him. He won’t speak of you. But there must be more.”
“There isn’t.”
Annalie’s hands wrap around her steaming mug. “You left your family for a weird, creepy building. There’s got to be more.”
“I left a life that wasn’t making me happy for this hotel. This beautiful, living, strange, being. And it understands, even if you can’t. That’s why I won’t be going back.”
Annalie looks as though she might argue, but instead pushes a slip of paper toward Sheryl. “I wish you’d come home now, but even if it takes you a weeks or months, or a year, I’ll wait. This is a flight voucher. I saved up for it. It doesn’t have a date, so use it whenever. Or not at all. That’s up to you. But you should know, Grandpa’s starting to ask for you. I wouldn’t have flown all the way out here if it didn’t matter.”
Sheryl slips the voucher into her sweater pocket and says nothing (says nothing to the hotel) while Annalie returns to her room.
•••
The hotel has never known stories to have consequences. Guests enter and exit, divulging some shreds of their life to the hotel but keeping most to themselves. Sheryl once asked why it cared about all the information it had or didn’t have about a world it would never experience. The hotel did not understand the question.
Did she never worry that there is a corner of her sidewalk that her feet will never reach? That there is a glass on the top shelf of her favorite bar that her lips will never touch? That there is something she could know, but through her own incuriosity, does not know?
Now the hotel begins to understand.
If it could ask Annalie a question, it would not ask where Annalie comes from. Or what colors flow along the edges of the freeways between here and there? Or how many birds pass over her house each day, and do they make their way through the same sky hanging over the hotel? It would ask if Sheryl is going to leave.
The hotel has always wanted answers, but for the first time, the hotel needs the answer to be no.
The hotel does not like to seal its doors. It does not like to feel a woman kicking the vertebrae of its doorframe, shouting to be let out. It does not like demanding what it is owed.
Annalie gives no stories or answers, just a barrage of curses, then tears. When she finds that the bone walls block both sound and cell service, she gives in, curling into her bed, resigned to her imprisonment.
But Sheryl notices her absence (she always notices), and marches to Annalie’s door. If bones had eyes, she’d make stern eye contact with the hotel, but as it is, she looks up at the cranial ceiling and says, “Open up.” The vertebrae unlatch, just long enough for Sheryl to slip through before the door reseals. She sits on the cushioned chair of intertwined radii and ulnas while Annalie rises and returns to testing the shut door.
“I’ve told it that locking people in their rooms doesn’t elicit the best responses, but it doesn’t listen to me,” says Sheryl.
“You left your family for this monster.”
“It’s not a monster. It’s threatened and doesn’t know how to talk to you.”
“I’ve never threatened it.”
“You want to take me away,” says Sheryl.
“It took you away from us, not the other way around. And now it won’t let either of us leave, even if you wanted to.”
Sheryl taps the arm of her chair and says to the hotel, “Like I said, a terrible method.”
The hotel has no other methods.
“Stop talking to a building.”
The hotel’s joints scream at Annalie.
“No,” says Sheryl. “You need to try talking to it. It wants to know why you’re here and why you want me to leave.”
“Bullshit,” says Annalie. “You want to know that.”
“Perhaps we’ve grown similar, over so many years. But I don’t control the doors. The hotel does.”
Annalie wraps the comforter around her shoulders. “If I try to explain, are you going to listen this time?”
“Listening is the only thing we can promise.”
The hotel does listen. In the breakfast hall, one guest recounts walking the streets of Mumbai and another describes the texture of a tortoise’s shell against his palm. While Annalie speaks, the hotel hears none of this.
“I didn’t know I had a grandmother until Grandpa started getting old,” says Annalie. “No one ever talked about you until he forgot who I was and started calling me by your name. Then he kept speaking of a woman enchanted by a hotel of bones, so I did some research and here I am. He doesn’t remember me anymore, but he still remembers you.”
“Ah.” Sheryl never cries, but humans have muscles that tense and flex their skin into patterns that reveal emotions they’d rather hide.
“Please come home,” Annalie says.
“I think you should go,” says Sheryl.
The hotel opens its doors.
It lets Annalie go because it does not need answers from her. But with Sheryl, it chitters and jabs her with metatarsals until she says, “Of course I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you what I left behind when I chose you. No person will understand why I would give up my life for a hotel of bones, and you will never understand what it is to walk away from everything. This was always my pain, and I chose to keep it for myself. You don’t get to have every story.”
•••
In the lobby, Annalie carves her name into the scapula desk where Sheryl sits. She leaves her a reminder intended to last in perpetuity.
It does not.
Bones do not scar the way people do. Its tissue heals, smooths over as though it had never been touched. And, like every other fleeting guest, nothing remains of Annalie’s visit.
Nothing but a piece of paper, folded over three times, and stashed in the pocket of an old woman’s sweater, the one she’d been meaning to send to the dry cleaners.
Then Sheryl, too, is gone.
In her absence the hotel learns to unclog its own sink drains and fuse cartilage around the windowpanes to keep the cold air out. It watches for her bones, the ones she said she’d bury beneath its rib cage, the only ones it thought would stay.
But when her bones at last return, they arrive still covered in sun-burnt flesh, still full of chatter while she inspects the piping beneath the sinks. “I think I’d like to see the world,” she says, in between telling the bones about a house on the side of a cliff, where saltwater sprays a fence laced with rainbow abalone shells. Of a family that wasn’t quite overjoyed to see her, but still suggested she might visit again someday soon. “I want to bring you more interesting stories than the small frets of my life.”
The hotel creaks and Sheryl takes the sound as encouragement. But the bones cannot explain that they have a thousand visitors with a thousand tales of a thousand worlds, but no one else to tell them if the tulips bloomed or the stray cat returned for more food.
“I’ll miss you, though. But you’ll be glad to have a break from my old voice.”
A single phalange, one of an array supporting the bathroom mirror, stretches away from its own skeleton. When Sheryl reaches for it, the joint pulls free and the fingerbone settles into her palm. But disconnected from its frame and marrow, the bone’s sheen of life dissipates.
“No, this won’t do,” says Sheryl. She has a utility knife in her pocket which she washes with a bit of soap (insufficient disinfection for surgical procedures). She makes a small but deep cut just above her clavicle, pressing the knife through her skin to where the tendon meets bone. The hotel cannot scream, only creak its bones and hope someone with vocal chords will come running.
She pushes the loose bone into her collar, where it worms itself into the humid tissues of her body, resting against a foreign skeleton. The sliver of the hotel ensconces itself inside her, pulling her skin over a hard lump of bone. She never screams, only whimpers as the hotel settles into her. Then she collapses.
Sheryl bleeds and the hotel bleeds too. It is a sympathetic bleeding, dripping from the walls, everywhere, the hotel in its entirety secreting red. The blood flows into a path, directing its onlookers toward the room where Sheryl’s body lies, still pulsing out its own blood. A newlywed couple finds her first, and soon the hotel is ushering emergency medics through its doors and watching Sheryl leave on a stretcher.
Then she is gone again (but not quite gone).
Cartilage fuses two bones together. Sheryl spends a day in the hospital while doctors stitch her wound and she convinces the staff that it was a clumsy accident, won’t happen again. (The building is made of concrete and speaks in a soft language the hotel does not understand. The bedsheets scratch at skin attached to muscle attached to tendons attached to bone.) Sheryl browses plane tickets while the wound heals. When the stitches come out, she says, “I think I’m ready, are you?” Outside its own skeleton, the hotel doesn’t know how to creak bones and voice a response, but she knows its answer.
