ARCADIA
I was relieved to discover I was the only guest in the hotel. The worldwide epidemic had finally ebbed, but its deadliness wasn’t its only legacy. It had sown a deeper rot: a gnawing fear that poisoned minds with doubt about the future and a generalised hatred of humankind. I didn’t mind. Hatred and aimless panic had existed long before the virus. The plague had merely sharpened what was already there — nothing more, nothing less. As far as I was concerned, half a year of lockdowns and empty cities was a small price compared with the rubble and uncountable dead of a full-scale war. We had got off lightly.
The drawback to being the sole resident was the poverty of observation. Hotel staff are a species apart, locked into their own quiet chapter of invisible, elegant ritual: the same measured movements, the same murmured phrases. The people at Arcadia departed from that romantic stereotype in several striking ways, yet that only made them more compelling.
At check-in I was met by a frail, middle-aged man — greying hair, grey eyes, a suit so faded it remembered black only in memory. He spoke in a near-whisper, forcing me to ask him to repeat himself several times. Each time he delivered the same words in exactly the same flat tone, betraying no irritation. Nothing, it seemed, could unsettle him. Perhaps because he already hovered on the border between life and whatever comes next.
He didn’t release the keys when I reached for them. Puzzled, I looked up. His pale gaze locked onto mine.
“Welcome to Arcadia, sir,” he said softly. “Here are your keys. The phones are dead, so if you want room service you’ll have to come down and tell me. Dinner is at six. Breakfast from seven. There are no minibars. If you want a drink, order it here.”
I took the keys, gathered my luggage, thanked him, and hurried up the stairs.
I have always loved to travel, yet the modern hotel increasingly disappoints. Ten years ago, even modest inns supplied a kettle, fresh tea bags and sugar each day. The prices were kinder, the service warmer, the value far greater. For me, a kettle and a few decent tea bags are now essential to surviving an evening. I suppose I have reached the age when one may say, without apology, that things were once different — and better.
My room was generous: two tall windows, a balcony overlooking the forest. The sheets and curtains were matching chintz; small vintage roses scattered across white. The decoration was dated, yet the hotel’s unpretentious simplicity had its own quiet charm. I liked it. I immediately dragged the desk closer to the balcony door so I could write with the view and the forest sounds beside me. I enjoyed being the only source of noise in the building. Neighbours mean either enduring their drunken noise after dinner or being blamed for your own midnight footsteps to the bathroom.
I had avoided unnecessary human contact long before the epidemic made it fashionable. My small circle of loved ones is enough. When I was younger, I tried reaching out more widely, but people’s unpredictability and self-absorption invariably left me bruised or worse. Once a woman told me about frequencies: how the Earth resonates at 7.83 Hz and every living thing supposedly tunes to that pulse. I listened to the recording. It left me unmoved. I suspect I’m a knot, a distortion in that wave — something that jars against other people’s dull, steady hum and leaves them uneasy. Human connection, for me, rarely works.
I stopped regretting that dissonance the day my cat Cherry died of liver cancer. He had lived with us for fourteen years — born and died on the same date. His quiet, ordered life held more substance than the carefully curated noise most people broadcast online. Cherry loved silence and routine. He slept most of the day in the centre of the living room or on a shelf of the television unit, keeping everyone in sight. When the vet delivered the terminal diagnosis, I broke down. The old cat, who almost never showed feeling, walked straight to me and gently bumped his head against my arm. In that moment I understood that this small creature — so different from me, so bound to instinct — recognised my grief and wished to comfort me. I have felt such wordless understanding only from my closest loved ones, never from strangers, and never — not once — from any lover or long-term partner.
But to return to the poverty of observation. Despite my disappointment in humanity and friendship, I found another way to stay connected to the world: I watched. I studied faces, overheard private exchanges, took notes, and fed everything into my stories. I have always admired writers who invent entire worlds, nations, even languages. Yet reality, if one simply looks and listens long enough, is just as strange and rich. Reality is what I choose to write about.
With no other guests at Arcadia my usual sources of material had dried up. I would have to turn instead to the hotel itself: the keeper, the staff, the deep, breathing silence of the empty corridors.
