desire to provide the guests—through an exuberant display of classical form conjoined with clarity of vision and an eye for the absolute—a certain architectonic reassurance, stimulation, serenity, inspiration. “Reverie and revelation,” as the brochure says. It was perhaps this emphasis on the spiritual that led to the hotel’s well-known material defects, serious enough for it to be in constant danger of losing one or more of its stars and being downgraded to the Petit or Ordinary Hotel Galactic Center. The furnace room is said to be particularly dangerous, for example, and the building, under perpetual reconstruction due to the lack of a sustaining kingpost and weak foundations, has virtually nonexistent emergency exit facilities and suffers frequent power failures. But in spite of its—admittedly fundamental—flaws, the Galactic Center retains, thanks to the architect’s whimsical genius of expression, a prevailing and compensatory lightheartedness, such that a night spent in it can be both majestic and frivolous, terrifying and consoling, deranging and healing, harmonious and chaotic. As one guest (who, alas, later disappeared) put it: “The Galactic Center: C’est moi.”
THE GRAND HOTEL FORGOTTEN GAME
Unlike many of the other grand hotels, the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game is as easy to find as closing one’s eyes and opening them again. The front desk, on the other hand, is deeply concealed within a labyrinth of movable panels of wood and glass and is shifted about from hour to hour, making checking into the hotel the first game one is obliged to play here, though by no means the most difficult. It is child’s play compared, for example, to finding one’s room afterwards. At the entrance, on the revolving doors (which are tricky; not everyone gets inside on the first try), there is posted a quotation, attributed to a 19th-century saint, that reads: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Though newcomers might be baffled by such an announcement, Forgotten Game regulars understand it to be a clue, by reverse logic, to finding the front desk: Locate yourself in a safe place and let the front desk come to you.
The rooms, however, can be accessed only by Ferris wheels and carousels (there are no elevators, stairs, or ordinary corridors, though one learns to recognize certain playgrounds and amusement parlors as secret routes of passage), such that the odds of being dropped off at one’s room are about the same as those of winning at roulette. Nor is reaching one’s door—if one ever does—the end of the game, for inserting the key can cause the floor in front of the door to drop away (the guessing and singing of “the song of the day” while inserting the key can prevent this) and send the guest flying down a ramp of wooden rollers past holes in the wall at which other guests are shooting with paint guns. The chute continues all the way to the bottom of the hotel, where it releases the splattered guest into the alleyway at the back, and the process begins all over again.
The hotel staff are all delightfully charming and kind, given to generous laughter, warm embraces, and amusing aphorisms, and playing hide-and-seek with the chambermaids and bellhops is not only encouraged, it is the only way to get breakfast or have your bed made, but it is useless to ask them for directions or advice when lost in the hotel. Not only are they instructed to provide only false clues and misinformation, many of them are deceivingly lifelike automata, programmed to provide random replies no matter what the questions. But clues are to be found everywhere; one need only look and sensibly puzzle out what one sees. Even the patterns of the colored sand in the sandboxes may provide directions, or the worn areas of carpets, the casual spray of jacks or marbles, the squawk of a parrot, candy wrappers behind a chair, a stack of alphabet blocks. At some point, one will probably
THE GRAND HOTEL FORGOTTEN GAME
Unlike many of the other grand hotels, the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game is as easy to find as closing one’s eyes and opening them again. The front desk, on the other hand, is deeply concealed within a labyrinth of movable panels of wood and glass and is shifted about from hour to hour, making checking into the hotel the first game one is obliged to play here, though by no means the most difficult. It is child’s play compared, for example, to finding one’s room afterwards. At the entrance, on the revolving doors (which are tricky; not everyone gets inside on the first try), there is posted a quotation, attributed to a 19th-century saint, that reads: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Though newcomers might be baffled by such an announcement, Forgotten Game regulars understand it to be a clue, by reverse logic, to finding the front desk: Locate yourself in a safe place and let the front desk come to you.
The rooms, however, can be accessed only by Ferris wheels and carousels (there are no elevators, stairs, or ordinary corridors, though one learns to recognize certain playgrounds and amusement parlors as secret routes of passage), such that the odds of being dropped off at one’s room are about the same as those of winning at roulette. Nor is reaching one’s door—if one ever does—the end of the game, for inserting the key can cause the floor in front of the door to drop away (the guessing and singing of “the song of the day” while inserting the key can prevent this) and send the guest flying down a ramp of wooden rollers past holes in the wall at which other guests are shooting with paint guns. The chute continues all the way to the bottom of the hotel, where it releases the splattered guest into the alleyway at the back, and the process begins all over again.
The hotel staff are all delightfully charming and kind, given to generous laughter, warm embraces, and amusing aphorisms, and playing hide-and-seek with the chambermaids and bellhops is not only encouraged, it is the only way to get breakfast or have your bed made, but it is useless to ask them for directions or advice when lost in the hotel. Not only are they instructed to provide only false clues and misinformation, many of them are deceivingly lifelike automata, programmed to provide random replies no matter what the questions. But clues are to be found everywhere; one need only look and sensibly puzzle out what one sees. Even the patterns of the colored sand in the sandboxes may provide directions, or the worn areas of carpets, the casual spray of jacks or marbles, the squawk of a parrot, candy wrappers behind a chair, a stack of alphabet blocks. At some point, one will probably
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