Hotel of the Dead

Tim MacGabhann - The Pig’s Back, Issue One

After I showered, I went downstairs, towards the sound of Pat and Toño talking away in Spanish somewhere. Yawning jaguar masks with whiskers as stiff as wire hung in the shadows above the stairhead. Through the windows was a charged darkness that meant rain. A tired, brownish smell of old clothes hung in the air, the envelopes on the desk were sallow, and a scrim of yellow dust coated the pigeonholes. There were three stopped clocks marked LONDON, NEW YORK, and MEXICO above the reception. The place was banjaxed, but I liked that: it looked the way I’d been feeling. There was a little delta of cracks right above the lintel, that when I’d first gone through, I’d stared at. The owner’s son, Toño, who was minding the place on behalf of his parents, had caught me looking.

‘Oh, don’t worry about those,’ he said. ‘The ones you want to worry about are the cracks curled in on themselves, like this.’ He’d clawed his fingers towards his palm. ‘Like letter “C”s? You see the “C”, you have to worry. Until then? No worries.’

‘Reassuring,’ I’d said, because it kind of was.

The big quake—the 1985 one—had only happened a few weeks before. Compared to the wreckage we’d driven past from the airport, a few ancient chairs with mangy upholstery was the least of my worries. The image came back to me of a highway overpass that swung up through the air, one curve of it cleft off, the edge of crumbled black tarmac and marl hanging in nowhere.

‘Quake hit at 7am,’ Pat had said, her gaze moving over the wreckage. ‘Imagine it, though. Just a random Thursday, and you’re barely awake, and you’re pissed off about work, the train, the wife, about spilling coffee on your pants, whatever, and then boom.’ She sucked air through her teeth. ‘Imagine if you survived. Jesus, I’d rather be dead. What would you do?’

I looked down on a splintered palm-tree next to a church whose dome was caved in like an egg-shell. It made me think of our shows in Belfast, a burned-out tree-stub in a field of ash somewhere in the waste ground beyond Dock Street.

‘I’m not sure I’d handle it all that well,’ I said.

Chatter and weed smoke came wafting out the doorway of the TV-room and into the reception hall where Daniel, the heavyset bearded older man who’d picked us up at the airport, was watching an action movie. A lad with bullet-wound in his shoulder and a bomb plastic-wrapped to his chest was cutting himself free with a Stanley knife.

‘Chingao,’ said Daniel and winced in synch with the actor.

‘Huh,’ I said.

I realised I'd seen the actor on the plane earlier. He had been tucking blankets over his mother’s knees in her wheelchair, muttering gently to her the way she must have done to him when he was small.

‘Buenas tardes,’ Daniel said, toasting me with a bottle of beer. He pointed to the lit-up room. ‘Los compas están allí en la pachanga.’

‘Y tú no?’ I said.

He shook his head gravely and jabbed himself in the chest with his thumb.

‘Working,’ he said gravely, then took a long, slow pull on his beer and went back to his film.

A villain died with a gurgle. The actor spat into the dirt.

‘Chingao,’ said Daniel mournfully.

I left him to it and went into the breakfast-room, where Toño lay sprawled on one armchair. Pat was slumped in another, wafting herself with the collar of her Aston Villa jersey. She’d packed for the weather. I had not. The black shirt and jeans I’d put on felt like neoprene, I was pumping out that much sweat. I’d known Pat a long time — ever since school. She’d been Patrick then. After the Inter Cert, she'd run off to Barcelona for a few years, returned under a new name and a waterfall of strawberry-blond curls that fell to the bone nubs of her shoulders, and looking a lot happier. She'd opened a cinema in town, a tiny arty one, all red warmth, stale smoke, and old popcorn. I'd linger there between tours and it was there that I’d seen the film that had brought us both here: The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler, 1973, starring Elliott Gould as Marlowe. I’d become convinced that I needed to come here, to find the town where they’d filmed this one scene, because of the colour blue hovering over it.

Pat’s room was right above mine, so I’d heard her ringing around among her Barcelona friends’ friends, trying to see if they knew anyone who could help us out. It wouldn’t be hard, she’d said, because all of her pals had been in art or music or cinema or whatever during her time there. Even so, I felt a tickle of hope. I desperately wanted this mad scheme of ours to work. She’d found it all a bit mad that I’d wanted to go, especially with all the news of the quake, so I explain how it was about the colours, about the bit where Marlowe gets off the bus, looking so weightless, so free, just this tiny little black shadow against the outline of the hills, the paths curving up and away into nothing. I told her that I’d love to just stand on that spot they filmed and feel something like that. She had just looked at me and said, ‘Kafka’s China. Yeah. I get it.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a note in a letter or a diary or something,’ she’d said, her eyes moving over the dull shopfronts across the road from her cinema. ‘He talks about wanting to take a boat along the rivers of China, until the fog slowly dissolves him. Something like that, anyway. But it’s the same feeling, I guess. The one you’re describing.’

‘Are you well?’ she said to me now, as I walked into the TV room. She put on a fake Nordie accent and lifted the joint to her mouth. ‘’Cos you’re looking well.’

‘Cheers, Pat.’

Toño gave me a salute, his eyes hazy, his smile sleepy. On the table between them stood a clear glass bottle, with little dark flecks floating in it.

‘You have got to try this, man,’ said Pat, pointing at it. ‘Holy fuck.’

She passed the joint back to Toño. ‘It’s better than the weed. Which, no offence, tastes like lawn, chief.’

‘Oh, none taken,’ said Toño, taking a suck of the joint and exhaling a long blue jungle-humid festoon at the ceiling. ‘It really does.’

I walked to the table and picked up the bottle. A few blackish dregs of what looked like dried herbs shook in the neck.

‘Sotol,’ said Toño, his voice a croak. ‘From Chihuahua. Ninety per cent proof, it can be. My father picked it up — some desert trip. It’s made from these cactus that are grey, dark grey, like steel, cutting up through sand. The sand is white as bone. But please, where are my manners.’

He took a glass from the marble top of the bar behind him.

‘Allow me,’ he said, and reached for the bottle I was holding.

‘And these little bits?’ I said, taking the glass he had poured me.

‘Dried peyote and weed, baby,’ said Pat from the armchair, her head leant all the way back. ‘Give us back the mic, will you, Fidel?’

‘Ah!’ said Toño. ‘Shit. Sorry.’

He took the joint from the corner of his mouth and passed it over to her.

‘Oh, what the fuck, man,’ she said. ‘This is soggy as hell.’

‘Yes,’ said Toño.

They had the telly on and were watching my tape of The Long Goodbye. It was paused on the opening scene showing Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, lying in a den of cigarette smoke and rumpled bedsheets. The box lay beside the telly. The cover showed a busy cartoon summary of the film: Marlowe aiming a gun, a cat on his shoulder like he was a pirate, while a woman with a bandaged face fled the arc of a glass flung by a cold-eyed blond man. An old man with a big beard loomed up from behind. Nina van Pallandt watched him with a weary expression and folded arms from the bottom corner.

‘We were waiting for you,’ Pat said, picking at the end of the joint. ‘To continue the research.’

            Toño nodded, flung one leg over the other, and pushed his chair back so he was in line with the screen.

‘Please,’ he said, gesturing to a wingbacked armchair with a leg that looked like it had been borrowed from another piece of furniture. ‘Make yourself at home.’

‘Cheers,’ I said.

Pat pressed play and Marlowe’s smoke went fraying up in crisp silver lines that knitted together in the cone of light above his head. His eyes were deep insomnia caves. Jesus, I knew what that was like. Touring, you can feel like you’re only alive two hours a day. Up there on the stage, your every vein is a flood of noise, your every nerve’s alight, and you are gone, drowned in a wave of sound that never breaks, only rises. The rest of the time it’s just doldrums, a dead man’s float, a listless bobbing.

I half-watched the film, half-dozed, sipping on the sotol, recalling the first time I’d seen it. It had given us the idea to come here: well, it had given me the idea to come here, and she’d gone along with it.

‘There,’ said Pat, springing upright, her finger pouncing on the pause button. ‘This place.’

An old-style American school bus was stopped mid-roll across the screen, the name on the side half-clouded in dust. Marlowe was stumbling half-wrecked down the stairs behind a Mexican woman and the two babies she was holding under her shawl, making his way toward the cindery darkness, a cigarette wagging at the corner of his mouth.

For a second the picture flipped in my head, became me and my brother Dónal in the car, cresting a hill, the birch branches before us as fine as capillaries against the white air.

She’d paused it at the perfect moment. The sky above the bus was the shade of blue that had been haunting me. The peace in that image: Elliott Gould as Marlowe about to step into the cool air, his head up for a moment to take in the beauty of the air – that was the feeling I was after, that was the feeling that had drawn me here. I hadn’t seen that colour blue with my eyes before: only felt it in my playing, because music is colours for me, before it’s anything else. Probably that’s why the business of reading music never appealed. Look too much like ash on snow, those staves and stems and all. All’s I do is shut my eyes, hands working the fretboard, and bam! there I am again, lost in that green, that blue, whatever tone I want. The association’s been there for as long as I can remember. Music had gotten me some of the way, but what I really wanted was to be there, with my body, under that blue — that faded blue, pure Panavision, straight out of old photos, that tinge like a blue sheet pulled taut across glaring white nothing. It makes me feel like a colour can be home and for me that home is blue.

I have the start of that knowledge pinned down to this one day, where it was me and my Ma. Must have been six, max, because I hadn’t begun playing anything more sophisticated than the Woolworth’s cheese-box and the six elastic bands. I was home sick from school, and Da was away working at Ardnacrusha, meaning I had her all to myself. It was just me following my Ma around the gaff, chuntering, yattering, telling her all sorts, while she just smiled and tried to get on with hanging the clothes or washing the dishes, stuff I helped with, naturally, if only as an excuse to see more of her. No, you know, it was five years old I must have been.

The sun was mid-height—eight, eight-thirty a.m., we’re talking—and I was passing the wooden clothes-pegs to my Ma. The transistor sat on the windowsill and out of the blue came the slow hypnotic gold of his trumpet—Louis Armstrong, La Vie en Rose. My hand in the peg-bag stopped dead and all I could do was stand there, dazzled by the sound and the light. I asked Ma who was singing, and she knew. It was Louis Armstrong, whose face I knew from the films, particularly the face on him when he was looking askance at people without them knowing, hiding his digs under a chuckle, a sidling sort of a defensiveness that I began to adopt at school and at home. I asked Ma if he was still alive and she said ‘No, he’s in heaven now’. Her euphemism had me led astray, and I thought she wasn’t saying he was dead — I thought she was saying he was God. I turned away from her to look at the sky, still automatically handing across the pegs, and for a moment I saw the sun hovering above the bowl of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet saw the gaps of sky between the clouds as the black keys of a piano, the thin bars of cloud as the white, and the sheer blue forever, and boom, that was it: God took on the face of Louis Armstrong, and music was nothing but colour in motion, forever and ever amen. If there was a God I worshiped at all, it’d be that colour blue, the floating peace of it, the sense of encroaching light, the sense of arrival that is always imminent, never final. I wanted to stand in that colour, for any length of time, sure that if I could, I’d probably feel alright to stop for good, give up, walk away, wave myself goodbye.

‘Well?’ Pat said, gesturing at the screen with her palm up, the glow of the colours from the screen seeming to catch in her bowled hand: creamy pink fog, faded-photograph blue, and a dust that shone almost gold.

There was a grumble of motors. The speakers buzzed. Toño squinted.

‘Yautepec,’ he said, reading the side of the bus on the screen, then tutted and sighed and let himself fall back against the chair. ‘Shit, Pat, no sabría decirte.’

Even through the layer of numbness in my stomach I could feel a sort of sad deflation. The size of the country had defeated us altogether: we were on a hiding to nothing.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘We’ve got our Plan B.’

‘And what’s that?’ I said.

She gave me a chin-jut and said, ‘While you were up there passed out, I was on the phone to some Barcelona friends, wasn’t I? And there’s a little party tomorrow. There’s some lad who works a bit in films here. American. Not a superstar or anything, he just does art direction and stuff. But he’s been here a wee while: he might remember someone working on it.’

Toño was looking at her through a moving curtain of smoke.

‘You alright?’ she said.

‘I’m trying to work out if I’m invited or not,’ he said, sounding more bewildered than hurt.

‘Obviously,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

‘Hallelujah,’ he muttered, and passed the joint back.

‘What I like,’ said Pat, ‘is how classical a detective Elliott Gould is in this. And you can laugh at what I’m about to say if you want to, but detectives, noir films, all yokes like that, they all say something like the closest thing to peace is wanting nothing at all. They’re nearly Buddhist. It’s the loneliness of the heroes, I suppose. There’s something indestructible in them. And it’s the same in this one. The more Marlowe loses, the lighter he gets, the freer he gets, the closer to happy he gets. Nothing could break you, if you could only live that way.’

I swirled my drink and listened. I had nothing to say. I was thinking about the best train trip I ever had, out of Tokyo to an English garden just outside Shinjuku Gyoen. It was ’77, when we played the Budokan. We had a guide that day, a lad from a record-shop who’d picked up his English from American films. He took us along an arcade of fir trees that looked like illegible writing against the black and white of the sky. He told us that in Zen, sky and emptiness are the same word.

That notion held me all the way home, made me feel like heaven could be wanting nothing at all, like a train journey that never ends. The way empty train-tracks ahead look, that silver curve through nothing, it’s a picture of my life on the road — hotel to hotel, venue to venue, city to city — a picture of where we’re all at, really. The same lonesome highway that we all must travel and the loneliness of that feeling sits as warm and comfy on me as a favourite denim jacket. Often I’ll not want to arrive in a place. I think the best bit is to be brinked on an adventure you never quite get to, lost to a motion so smooth you may as well not be moving at all. Heaven could be just that, maybe, the sense that you’re always about to get to where you’re going, with no rush, and still with so far to go but in such comfort that you may as well not be moving.

I could have stayed there forever on that train, back towards the lights of Tokyo, on and on through bluing air, through frozen trees curving up from either side of the road like a tunnel, a pair of studio-grade headphones pumping the bass into my ears. Travel’s a kind of death, like, way I see it, or else it’s a preparation for death, and so, if there is an after-death, I’d want it to be on a train, headed forever through a blue glow of evening, cushioned in warmth and half-sleep, my eyes forever on a particular point that’s always about to hover into view but never quite does, forever before me, never reached, home, gone, nowhere.

Outside the TV room a storm had swung in from somewhere, the air seething: loud, white, an ocean, an elated concert crowd. Our little pod of heat and drink and electricity felt like a coracle bobbing around in a roaring nothing. For a moment I missed the sweaty commotion of my shows, the song hovering in the waves of noise, the beat going neither backwards nor forwards, merely hovering, merely there, holding you and the band in the air, abiding above the noise, the sweat dotting your face like a spray of brine, until the solo breaks and the song crashes endlessly onward, the scales climbing all around you like pillars of vapour, no words in my head, not one syllable, only the speech of the guitar itself, the throat in you raw, as though with a burn and a drown at once, and then that crashing instant comes where you are home, gone, nowhere.

‘The cosmology of what you say is quite cool, yes,’ said Toño, reaching for the joint that Pat had just finished with. ‘And familiar. Before the Spanish came, the vision of the afterlife here was very different. After you died, your soul would come back to itself on a path leading on through forest, and fog, and desert, walking and walking, on and on, the wind stronger and stronger, stripping you of your clothes, then your skin, until you were a walking skeleton, and you mightn’t stop for many years, not until you found the place where your bones were finally blown separate from another, and paf.’ 

Toño clapped his hands and made me jump.

‘The end.’

He gestured at the window. ‘And this time of year, with the rain, the fog, it feels like you’re there already, you know? In that other world.’

Orb-lamps glowed in the mizzling air. For a moment I saw anglerfish circling above the wreck of a plane, an old wreck, rusted to the texture of coral. I saw Marlowe as a black dot against the pink dawn. I saw the blue curves of those hills that I needed to find.

‘I really hope these people at your party know where this town is,’ I said, looking at the little black flecks that floated in my glass, tiny starlings in a tiny sky.

‘They will,’ Pat said, giving me another finger-gun over the rim of her glass. ‘I’ll beat it out of them if I have to.’

‘We’ll get you there, maestro Gallagher,’ said Toño, giggling a little, and toasted me with the joint. ‘Dead or alive.’

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