Underground, with the World Wars raging overhead, Arp traveled past one ghost hotel ad after another. Each time he saw the ads, pasted to the walls or trampled onto the floors of frigid tunnels that sometimes appeared manmade and other times like relics from a pre-history when the ocean was not yet wet, he recalled a long, ill stay there, a stay of many bleary weeks, but he could tell, even in recollection, that the bleariness came from the fact that this stay had not yet occurred. The ghost hotels were not yet ghost hotels, though there was no realm in which he could consider them — as if it were his consideration itself that turned them ghostly — in any other light.
Whether he’d been sick during his stay or only now, recalling or foreseeing it, was a question that he knew was idle to entertain, though this didn’t stop him from doing so. Indeed, he wondered if the sickest thing about him was his inability to hold back. He could feel the hotels withering in his mind, crumbling into its ground the more he tried to picture them in their pre-War glory, but he could not stop this process from taking place.
As a corollary to the phenomenon that had worn down his resolve in Zagreb and resulted in his meeting with Leopold and the Art Lesson that nullified the life he’d been living and set him loose upon the bed of the ocean, he knew that he could only see ads for this hotel so many times — ads and then, before long, smudged and crumpled “thank you for trusting us with your stay” notes, as if he’d just checked out — before his ability to journey onward abandoned him and he checked into the nearest branch (if it was truer to call each iteration of the hotel a “branch” instead of a version of the very same place).
***
He passed “branch” after “branch,” each one featuring an image of himself frozen solid in an armchair in the lobby on the other side of a cracked and shimmering window, until he felt his own joints and ligaments grow sticky and sluggish and then he turned into the nearest “branch” — by now, down in what seemed the very midpoint of the Atlantic seafloor, all he could see was one such Arp-stocked lobby after another, like an infinite exhibit — and peeled a “thank you for trusting us with your stay” note from the bottom of his boot, handed it to the clerk, and collapsed into an armchair across from his frozen double.
***
Though he knew this secondary Arp would now thaw and resume the journey while his own body froze, and that this tag-team approach was the only means by which either of them would make it across the ocean, his eyelids iced over long before he got to see this process through. By the time the other Arp rose from its armchair, settled its bill at the desk, received a “thank you for trusting us with your stay” note as receipt, and resumed the westward undersea journey, the first Arp was nothing but a totem, a piece of decor parked in the lobby of one hotel after another after another, menacing the Arp who now roamed the underside of the Atlantic with the certainty — one part memory and one part prophecy — that he too would be unable to go on like this for long.
He could already see that soon, very soon, he would give in to the cold and the fatigue, the disorientation of “branch” after “branch,” as if beneath the ocean lay nothing but an expanding cluster of ghost hotels. Then he would peel a “thank you for trusting us with your stay” card off his boot, hand it to the clerk in the lobby, and take his seat across from his frozen double, who would then, someplace under Nova Scotia……..