Stopover at the Rest Holiday Beach Resort
Vacation gothic
There was an awkward moment as the bellhop stood at the threshold of Ruben's suite. His body was out there in the hallway, but his hand stretched back into the room with palm open, as if testing for interior raindrops. Mostly, in the purely physical sense, the bellhop was gone, but his soliciting palm remained as a token of what had passed between them. Like a codicil on a will.
Ruben was at a loss what to do, but then remembered from the movies: this is where a cash transaction is expected. He had no social finesse, so he just flat-out asked — without any ill-feeling, just inquiring out of interest, as you do:
—How much am I expected to give you?
The bellhop was unfazed by his gaucheness and responded without even blinking.
—A hundred dollars. Or two hundred, as you wish.
—A hundred dollars for opening my door and switching the lights on and off?
Again without rancor, simply curiosity.
—Or two hundred, added the young man.
The demeanor of the bellhop was impressively impassive and professional. There was no tremor of either his outstretched hand or his voice as he expanded on his theme:
—Sir, it's more the sense of belonging that you're buying into here. The peace of mind of knowing that you form part of the Ballard Hotel community. A family, if you like. You will be one of us, and we will take care of you as if you were our beloved brother.
—And for two hundred?
—Like you were two of our brothers. You get the gist. You've come here for relaxation, for peace of mind. It would be a pity to have that putative peace shattered by a misunderstanding right off the bat, wouldn't it? An unfortunate commencement indeed.
Still the hand, still the outstretched palm within his space. The rest of the bellhop's body out in the corridor, at attention, military-style, with the left hand folded neatly behind his back. Steady gaze and a placid unhostile smile.
Ruben gave him a hundred and fifty, and hoisted his suitcase onto the bed as the door clicked shut behind him. He thought later that he should have asked the young man's name. He thought to do so next time. But as it turned out, he'd never see him again. There never was a next time.
Even with the Last Days Discount, it was still a fairly sizeable spend to book two weeks all-in at the Ballard. But Ruben had plenty saved up after a solid career of thirty-five years as comptroller in a medium-sized government administrative office, and was without any family to speak of. So might as well.
He opened the shuttered doors to the balcony and looked out at the sea view. It was exactly as wonderful he'd expected, while also exactly as disappointing as he'd expected. Contradictory feelings nullified each other, coming to lay as glassy as the water out in the glinting distance.
There was a wide stretch of pale beige sand with parasols and recliners placed at exact geometrical intervals. The puffy bodies of sunbathers could be seen ambling slowly between their stations and the sea. Languidly they strolled for a little while in the ankle-lapping waves, and then dawdled back towards exterior showers bordering a plank catwalk. There they sprinkled themselves with cool fresh water before collapsing back onto the recliners.
Darker faces, men and women in black vests and bow ties with thick dark aprons, carried voluminous trays of colorful drinks out to the lounging guests from the bar. The small pink and lime-green umbrellas on the brims of the bowl-like glasses visually echoed the large parasols hoisted up above the recliners. The servers scurried where the vacationists lolled heavily or trudged about, weaving between them like efficient dolphins cresting sluggish waves.
The Ballard Hotel was a five-star establishment, or at least it was when it was built. Now it had slipped a star after some unavoidable outbreaks of hot-weather ticks and full-spectrum scabies, and a mysterious condition apparently brought on by contaminated fruit. Toxic watermelons, or so it was rumored. A condition that made certain meats impossible to digest safely and brought on intermittent tinnitus or ringing in the ears, along with dizziness and fainting.
At present, then, The Ballard officially boasted four stars, though many guides bumped it down another star because of a recent spate of sudden inexplicable deaths. The hotel management countered with studies showing that deaths here were statistically no more probable than in many other vacation spots, and that in any case the most spectacular and violent deaths couldn't reasonably be attributed to the hotel, all other things being equal. For that reason the fourth star remained in most official listings, since the industry generally felt that 'innocent until proven guilty' was a fair standard when it came to unexplained decapitations and dismemberments.
There was, however, no disguising the hairline cracks in the ceiling of the suite and the rather musty smell that came from the curtains and bedding. Ruben now unlatched the balcony doors to air the place out, and they creaked open with some difficulty. A wave of noise filled the room, seagull squawks and the yelping laughter of tourists, along with the overhead hum of surveillance drones. Ruben fetched a soda from the minbar and sat down in a plastic easy chair to take in the scene.
Rest Holiday Beach Resort was nearly everything it had been promised to be. Most of the descriptions on the resort webpage were technically accurate, and very few literal claims could be said to be misleading in an intentional way, or in any sense void an implicit contract with clients. Since it had been built in a hurry, in somewhat difficult conditions, it was inevitable that a little of the publicity material, just a few of the blender animations and artists' depictions, wouldn’t be realized quite completely.
That was to be expected. Circumstances of the construction project made that unavoidable. The unexploded ordnance teams and cleanup crews were still working onsite when the first foundations were laid. Some allowances had to be made.
Some way offshore, the armed protection skiff made a southbound pass. Vacationists on jetskis made friendly buzzes at the craft, and the automatic cannons tracked them watchfully but of course didn't shoot. A sailor on the rear deck, in full body armor with helmet and faceplate, waved at the jetskiers, and to the beach sunbathers and the hotel beyond. Ruben, sipping on a Coca-Cola, waved back politely though he imagined the man wouldn't see.
He was starting to enjoy himself, because after all it was so much like home here.
Around sundown, feeling pretty relaxed after a dip into the suite minibar fridge, Ruben went for a stroll on the beach. He decided to debut the Hawaiian shirt he'd purchased for his trip, all palm trees and pirate macaws in brilliant orange and green. The palm trees lining the boardwalk were not quite so lush, untended and cracklingly papery, with bundles of dates that fell in dry clusters like raisins. But the shirt captured the spirit, if not the literal truth, of his beach vacation.
The elevated boardwalk extended north and south parallel to the sea. The protection skiff was heading northwards, so Ruben decided to head in the same direction. He was fascinated by the way the automated cannons would follow items and people, even seagulls, in its sights, jerking and tracking, the servomotors audible above the lapping breakers. The gunboat's robotic brain had an unlimited desire to take in everything around it, a puppylike curiosity that he found endearing.
Out beyond the boat the sun was descending in brilliant gold and flame orange into the western sea. Hundreds of cellphones were poised from reclining figures on sunloungers to capture that sight and the sunbathers were careful to trace the sun's declining path so the videos would look professional.
Soothed by fridge vodka, his skin and joint conditions in abeyance, Ruben felt pretty good as he plodded up the boardwalk to the north, his head craning leftward as far as it would turn so as to take in the sunset.
The boardwalk reached an end after a ten minute walk. It ended at a chicken-wire fence with barbed razorwire trailing along the top, which itself topped a structure of concrete fragments, twisted steel rebar protruding at all angles from shattered blocks of gray like the rusted tentacles of iron seamonsters. Feeling whimsical, Ruben turned to the left and went down the boardwalk steps, to arrive onto the beach itself. He paused to take off his sandals and press his toes into the sand.
Few bathers were in this sector; the beach was open and pristine for quite a distance to the south. The breakwater structure stood to his right, a tumble of huge concrete pieces heavier than the world itself, extending out to sea with the ribbon of wire fencing topped by razors along its top. In the same way that a child will pile up shells and pebbles on the strand to make a little wall, some unimaginable giant had smashed entire city blocks to later heap athwart this stretch of seafront.
Ruben, standing at the base of the breakwater, feeling tiny as a bug, thought the effect was awe-inspiring. His mind swam at the sheer engineering power required to tug these vast broken chunks out of whatever blasted city block they had been rooted in, and then to assemble them into this tumbledown structure which stood as monumental as some silent ancient temple devoted to gods of unknown chaos.
He headed for the sea, intending to dabble his toes in the warm water and contemplate the sun, now blood red, as it sank below the horizon. The protection skiff had reached the end of its patrol arc and swung round to the south. The same armored sailor, or maybe another, appeared on the rear deck carrying an assault rifle and waved, this time distinctly at Ruben. The automatic cannons on the poopdeck whirred and jerked, training their barrels on Ruben as he stood with his feet in the gently lapping surf. He waved back, happy to be included once more. He pulled a minibar miniature of gin from his shorts pocket and slugged it down, casting the tiny bottle against the breakwater where it disappeared into the shadows between the blocks.
After the sun went down, a sight caught on a thousand cellphone videos duly tagged and posted by all the other vacationists to the south, the air on the beach became cooler and the sound of the surveillance drones more noticeable as the seagulls retired inland. Bats started flitting through the air, swifter and more intent than any bird, snapping suddenly to different trajectories too fast for human slowness to follow. Over on the boardwalk a number of lamps lit up. But only around a third of them shone; the rest remained dark within their lamposts like so many sooty eggs.
Beyond that, to the southeast, The Ballard Hotel. The lower floors were brilliant with fairy lights trailed in strings of purple and green and pink and gold. Brilliant strands of white LEDs strobed fitfully. Higher up, the floors were dark, and cracked broken windows could be dimly discerned in the shadows. Higher still, the uppermost floors and the penthouse gleamed in luxuriant luminescence, with floods of color that mingled in never-seen shades of yellowed teal and bluish chartreuse and bronzed mauve. Naked figures could be seen cavorting on the balustrades, wizened bloated flesh and youthful beauty mixing promiscuously as if nightmarish expressionist paintings of hideous monstrosities were leaning up against classical sculptures of demigods and nymphs.
On either side of the penthouse suite were twin turrets, quad flak guns and racks of missiles trained at the sky. These moved from side to side, as if to the beat of the Ibiza house music that played from a DJ's sound system on the main party deck, where young women splashed into an infinity pool and huge men with earpieces whose tuxedos were bulked up with bodyarmor kept their heads on swivels and murmured into throat mics. Ruben thought he saw a body fall from this great height into the darkness below, but nobody screamed or even stopped dancing, so he figured he must have imagined it.
He started walking along the beach, feet sploshing through the weak waves lapping softly on the sand. Something made him turn around, look back toward the enormous breakwater mole that loomed just above. Between where he stood on the beach and the great darkness of the structure was a pool of diffuse light, and a child of eight or nine was standing where he had just passed. The child carried a stick which he was using to draw a shape in the sand.
Ruben stopped to watch the boy draw his figure in the wet sand. It was a heart. He sketched it once, then went back over the shape to deepen its furrows, to add definition. A heart like you'd see on the social media to show you'd liked a post. A heart like a lovelorn teen puts on the end of a note to a schoolyard crush before ripping it up and throwing in the trash from shame. A heart like a million valentines. Only that.
Ruben's own heart twanged from pain. The form was like what his own child Rhonda had drawn for him before she went away. My daddy love. Love my daddy. Before his happiness all died. Before it went away. He watched the child draw over and over again the same mark in the soft sand. He saw the waves come lapping in slowly to erase it, and knew that nothing could stop that process from happening.
Now he stirred and looked around him. There was a general dim phosphorescence around, perhaps a luminescence contained in the advancing water itself. The faraway scattered lamps on the boardwalk gave little light, but the towering Ballard Hotel in the distance put out so much more illumination, with its fairylights and partylights, and now a pair of searching spotlights tracing circles of blinding white out towards him. But here everything was dark, though with that almost imperceptible glow in the air.
So it was with sound. The Hotel complex was throbbing with Ibiza techno, with the thrumming of overhead drones, with the distant laughs and screams of partygoers. Here at the shore it was quiet. There was the lapping of the warm Mediterranean waters, the splash of Ruben's feet as he idly kicked one after another where he stood, and there was a soft voice in his ear:
taken
The status of this word is not clear to Ruben. Is it an utterance spoken to him by the child? An imagining of his own? The voice of some cryptic god?
taken
He hears it spoken by himself, by other voices, by his lost Rhonda. That word.
taken
He understands it perfectly.
As he looks around again, the searchlights from the hotel roof stretching out to claim him back, there are others here on the beach. Children like the first child, scrabbling shapes with sticks, and veiled women squatting on the sand and drawing shapes idly with their fingers. They're all silent like him. Ruben decides that they've crawled through the spaces between the huge concrete blocks and made their way to this quiet place, this stretch of beach, while they're still unseen. He worries that he's ruined it for them by being here and being so conspicuous. A guest, a vacationist, is not supposed to be in this place at this time.
The protection skiff turns about in the water and heads back north towards where Ruben stands amid the scrabbled-out childish shapes of hearts and stars. Crude sandcastles, more like tiny heaps of sand pushed together without spades, with small hands only, are all around where he stands. They too will be erased by the waves when the tide turns.
Twin beams of light come from the skiff and meet the searchlight cones probing this way from the hotel roof. This stretch of beach is awash with light now, and the dark silent figures have all disappeared — back into the cracks in the breakwater, he supposes. For now only their scratched-out shapes remain on the sand.
Standing in the warm ankle-deep water, Ruben raises his hand and waves a greeting at the sailor in full combat armor and faceplate visor as he settles into the machine-gun nest at the bow of the gunboat.
==={ Stopover at the Rest Holiday Restort / End }===
More of this kind of thing…?
Deepwish
The white whale cruises stately through the deepest avenues of krill and hears the wishes in the water of other whales. These wishes are songs of yearning which call for food or companionship or mates. There was a time when this old white one would call his own songs, singing his vivid wishes out for miles and miles, but he has no wishes any longer.
