I wandered through a hotel diverse and miraculous. It seems that I had
lived there as a child, and indeed it bore some of the features of one of the
apartment buildings in which I grew up, along with some distinctive traces of
a building in which I spent a handful of my formative years.
Paper figures, delicately painted and folded, lived and moved in opulent
rooms and hallways interspersed with dank cellars with leaky, rusted pipes. I
passed by a red velvet lounge, railed round with wrought iron, accessible via a
curving staircase of ivory steps and tended by a woman made of clattering
wooden boxes. The boxes which comprised her body were very delicate, inscribed
with scripts of gold and silver, inset with jewels, graced with intricate
handles; they opened and closed in gentle unison with her movements as she
wiped down the bar and arranged the glasses.
Elsewhere waiters constructed entirely from mysterious playing cards and
decorated with characters in an unknown language carried trays bearing exotic
concoctions. Everybody everywhere was in costume, wondrous and full of mystery.
An aristocracy of wooden puppets intermingled with figures of beautiful
destitution. A woman made from painted sticks and rags sang sonorously, her
voice meandering over balconies and through half-hidden gratings.
I was searching for my apartment, unable to find it within the
labyrinthine hallways. Retracing my steps, I found that the hotel was in a
state of constant flux, never retaining its form in any one place for very
long. I wondered if it had always been this way, perhaps I'd simply never
noticed in as a child. I vaguely recalled that the place was created as an
homage to some fabulous movie, long since forgotten by almost everybody, yet still
cherished by few.
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