A Hotel Bar of Redemption

From the pictures, the hotel looked majestic during the summer. Gilded in sunlight, umbrellas lined the terrace while women in abstract sunglasses lounged beside the infinity pool, drinking things with slices of orange floating in them. But it was November, that time of year when everything feels like a terminal illness, and the windows on the upper floors were dead. Rain pelted the asphalt when I arrived at the seaside hotel, armed with a single duffel and a coat that was all but wilting. 

The lobby was dim, and had it not been for the two floor lamps flanking reception, each exuding a dull orange hue, I would have tripped over my own feet. The guy behind the desk looked skeptical while sliding the key across the counter. I was promptly informed that the hotel was currently hosting four guests, one of whom was me, and apart from the first floor, the rest had been closed for winter. The bar, apparently, opened at midnight.  

I got to my room, a hole suspended in limbo with its burgundy tapestry and Victorian furniture. I left my bag by the bed and didn’t bother unpacking it. At first, I blamed it on the strange lethargy that seemingly pulled the strings of all my decisions. Travel disorients people, after all.  

The balcony overlooked the sea, which I imagined would have been picture-worthy in the July heat. In November, it looked empty and abandoned, save for a few loungers being battered by the wind. 

The hotel seemed to exist in a very specific and peculiar state of waiting. It was waiting for summer, it was waiting for more guests, it was waiting for someone to breathe back life into it. Even the corridors felt as if they were on pause, carpets swallowed footsteps and frames absorbed the sound of keys turning into locks. But all hotels existed in a state of suspended anticipation, everyone inside them was either arriving or preparing to leave. 

The bar was downstairs. I got there five minutes past midnight, and part of me felt like coming home. In retrospect, that should have concerned me. 

A bar is a cemetery for the despondent, the old and the brooding souls. Four-walled sorrow. Burgundy tapestry, a choice of color the decorator of this place seemed to favor, and tattered stools with chipped gold paint that spun the forlorn decades of those who had sat on them. The stench of alcohol had seeped below the carpet, and inside the cement, and the stories of the drunken and the damaged were left behind to be gossiped about by the inanimate objects that had witnessed it all. 

The tables were scratched, withered by time and immediate contact. The stools stood tall but gaunt, and they let out a painful screech if someone moved a muscle. The mirrors were littered by stains of unknown origin and substance, deliberately left there to reflect back something other than what actually stood before them. The ghosts mingled and co-existed in the bar, but with a vacant desire to speak to one another.

I knew them before I knew how. Their stories came to me as soon as I looked at them, faces and facts I had no recollection of acquiring but didn’t think to question why either. 

One sat at the far end—a drunk father who lost his daughter and wife in a tragic accident. He began staying at the hotel when he could no longer stomach the idea of returning to their home. He had come to this bar every night afterward, ordering whiskey after whiskey until he threw up. And then he ordered another one. He died two years after the accident, heart attack they said. He still sat there and stared with a blank expression at the cigarette which had become an extension of his hand, while he simply let it burn into a perfect narrow cylinder of ash between his index and middle finger. 

Another occupied a seat in the middle of the bar—a writer he used to be. Not so much of a drunk, as he was depressed. A lonely man with eyes that expelled kindness. He wrote and wrote for five years in this exact spot. Filled a page and then dumped it. Now that he was dead, surely he had something more interesting to write about.  

A middle-aged woman—burned down her ex-husband’s house. No, it wasn’t an accident, she planned it for a while inside of this very bar. No one interjected, her husband was an abuser and a drunk and not one of those welcomed in the bar of redemption. By the time she tried to leave, the flames had encompassed the exits. She now sat perfectly still on a table farthest away from the bar and the fermented scent.  

Some souls were more frayed than others. Threads hanging loosely from a fabric that had long stopped trying to cover anything up. 

Tom stood behind the bar. The bartender who poured and poured, holding communion everyday. He was also dead, though nobody knew how. 

No one questioned the holy. 

I went back to the bar every night, sat in the booth behind the writer and waited. I waited until time no longer felt real, and yet his pages never filled. The father’s cigarette never seemed to shorten either, and the woman who had killed her husband didn’t move a muscle. Tom polished the same glass with the same cloth as though repetition were the only kindness the afterlife had to offer. 

Everything remained as it was, night after night. 

I soon began to notice that I wasn’t much different. Come morning, I would realize I had no memory of falling asleep, and my coat would still hang damp by the door, as though the night had refused to dry it. I never ate, I never drank, I never changed clothes, and my coat never dried. 

On my fourth day there, I found myself pondering what the receptionist had told me. Four guests staying at the hotel. The father. The writer. The woman. And me. 

Tom didn’t count, he belonged to the place in the same way the dirty mirrors and stained carpets did. I had never seen him anywhere but behind the bar, and I had a growing suspicion that if the hotel were to be burned to the ground, Tom would remain standing amongst the ashes, polishing the glassware. 

It was a hallowed-out silence that cascaded through the bar, but it wasn’t saddening. 

No one was sad, because you can't be anything when you’re dead.