The lobby is toasted. You can already tell from out here in the way its light reaches. It’s the part of November that shows deep glints of winter. You get out of the car and walk, the wind drawing outlines of snow all over the dark. Sketched in quick, disappearing strokes sharp enough to have come from one of your dad’s mechanical pencils. You let the cold settle far enough into your skin to suggest itself once you come inside. The world through the door is lit by amber, already preserving itself before the arrival of memory, sealed against the muted roar of time.
You’ve entered an advent calendar, a curated tableau of seasonal decorations so honed in their presentation as to be awake to their own textures. Each decoration appears snugly wrapped in gold leaf colored everything, which lays warm and hushed between wintry and autumnal. Every surface waits for you to press your nails in until you tear the foil, savoring its wrinkle in so many small folds. The action would reveal what you’re sure is a thin coating of chocolate that will quickly start to perspire, that holds infinite impressions of vanilla and nutmeg and cinnamon and every other sweetness that blankets you gently with its chill. Not that you would ever want to broach the foil, to confirm its textural presence. You prefer as always the knowledge that you are standing there, sharing the same space as all its depths.
The Christmas tree is somehow secularized, signifying nothing more than its aesthetic aspirations. The gingerbread castle, its grounds a field of twinkling white down, is too clearly a work of craftsmanship to hail from a sedate nutcracker realm, as if its builder had fled from an Eastern European cupboard, smuggled through Ellis Island customs inside a tin can. The concierge and check-in desks are in an alcove to the right, carpeted in maroon and browns deep with caramel. You haven’t started to consider this place’s function as a hotel yet, lingering still in its panoramic view of the season. It’s like when you saw The Polar Express and the uncanny quality of the motion-captured effects became more and more suspended as the film went on, so that by the time the characters finally arrived at the North Pole, its sprawling animated splendor was as real as the rest of the world. Except that this place isn’t so Christmas-y, with the sweaters and the ham and the music that spells out all the feelings you’re supposed to have, the endless ornaments and scripted moments of gratitude that cushion out any chance of encountering something ineffable. The lobby is unresolved, deep with suggestions and impressions waiting to be filled by you and whatever this year still has left to bring along.
You know you can’t stay long enough for the space to grow normal. You know the worst thing you could do is acclimate so much to its warmth that its distinctness stops being identifiable. You think that’s what happens to people who live in New York. The city that is. A holiday that gives way ever so silently and permanently to life and everything else. You could never take access to that kind of wonder away from yourself. Not willingly.
Your parents are coming in with your sister, your suitcases stacked on the luggage rack the doorman rolls behind them. You know they’ll leave you two there for a few minutes as they check in. Your sister is already over by the castle, crouching down to see what its snow actually feels like. From her expression the answer is sufficiently unexpected. You go over next to her and each take turns remarking on the building’s architectural features: “What’s that made of?” “How did they build that?” “I don’t know.” “Do you think that’s edible?” There’s so much unrevealed about its structure available to ponder as you take in its sweet and spiced smell that invites renewed scrutiny. You kind of want to eat it at this point, but recognize its value as a public good, in addition to the fact that it would be, at best, stale and glue-stained. None of that quite quells the idea. Your parents come back to take you to the room, where you can go through cursory motions of settling in before finding the rest of the family.
The rooms are always booked on the same floor, recasting the hallways for the next four days as a transitory domestic space of chance encounters and unguarded interactions. In the lulls between events that take at least an hour to be scheduled, you can go over to the room of one of your uncles or first cousins once removed or grandparents and sample what the taste of empty time would be like if you were living with them. This is invariably more interesting than the chronological manga volumes and newly bought Pokémon game that you leave mostly untouched by your rollaway bedside once you’ve finished unpacking, with the exception of the occasions you get to show them off excitedly to your cousins. There is the hope, in each of these instances, that they will find the same enamorment and capacity for transportation in these objects as you do, that they will return next year with their own copies and that this will become something in which you can share. Instead they remain spectators, polite guests to your passions, as you largely are to theirs, not the brothers you imagine you could be growing up with right now each time that you see them. Your sister is interested in some of these things, but not in the same ways, and to different ends. Besides, every time you let her borrow them she returns your volumes with their covers’ bent. You don’t share them with her anymore if you can help it. It’s hard to be nice to her when she can’t be nice to them. You just want your things to be taken care of, for people to treat them as holding the same value you know they have. The volumes are stacked upside down at all times, even inside your backpack, in the hopes that their covers will no longer lift when you leave them facing the air.
You and your family take the elevator back down to the ground floor and no sooner have you caught the eyes of your cousins than the three of you form a group, now running off from your respective parents to go explore. It’s the same building as the Thanksgiving before and the Thanksgiving before that and the Thanksgiving where you first met as infants. Four days primarily penciled in with family ceremony before you even get there leaves too little time to get to know a place of this size and just enough for its corners and contours and half-hidden corridors to assume the air of the instinctively familiar. A place you sense holds something key about yourself that you will never be able to stop trying to discover. A mystery that has to remain, so you’ll all have a reason to come together next year and give it a new appraisal. That’s how it would happen in one of your YA novels. You and your cousins, uncovering a secret dimension of reality running in quiet parallel to the one you know, are thrust into a quest that takes you into the darkest depths of the hotel. You sidelining your sister until discovering at the end that she was a real hero the whole time, as she saves the three of you from destruction and together you defeat the entity that’s trying to take over your world. There’s always something to defeat.
You keep running until you find the fish tank. A vast glass cylinder reaching up to the second floor, the carpeted stairs winding around it like a helix. There’s an inherently cinematic feeling to taking them, the frame panning in exact step with your motion, like you’re seeing something remarkable for the first time just as the exposition relays the extent of its importance. There’s a restaurant at its base that you’ll find your dad and uncles at soon, a mix of a pub and sports bar. Waiters with white shirts and black vests carry plates of nachos to mahogany tables under the lighting of a pool hall as American football games play in the background, mostly as ambience. You don’t find it very interesting, except to look at from the outside against the clarity of the water. The fish float in any direction that pleases them, a freedom of movement that appears from the other side of the glass like everything you would need to occupy time. Ascending and sinking and circling and drawing patterns you would never think to think of simply with their presence in space. You wonder what someone would be able to see sketched out, watching you through the walls of the hotel over the course of these days. Something you can’t come to by yourself, but that no one else would have a reason to look for.
Taking the stairs to the top of the tank leads you to the arcade. Adorning the wall opposite are framed portraits of Jewish entertainers on loan from the Catskills, none of whom you will come close to recognizing. It’s an arcade in the most defunct sense. The machines might work, but neither you nor your cousins have ever been incentivized to ask for the coins to try them. Their vintages are so haphazard that it’s hard to conceive of a time when the place felt new, the whole thing a pastiche of anachronisms, a museum of pop artifacts that never had a reason to be remembered, enduring in spite of themselves and the progression of the world outside. It might’ve all been junk were it not so obviously cared for and preserved, clearly organized in the service of some underlying idea―one well-forgotten, even as it continues to be made visible. You and your cousins wander for a while, confident only that there’s some shared thing compelling you not to leave. Eventually you’re loitering, and, realizing that your parents are definitely looking for you by now, you head down the stairs along the tank to run back.