“We stop serving breakfast at dawn,” said the receptionist primly. She looked like my sister, if my sister braided her hair and had glasses; the same shaped face, the same snub nose; even the same slightly-whiny voice. Her outfit: an entirely respectable two-piece suit over a white blouse with a little brass (or bronze, I couldn’t quite make it out) brooch pinned to the lapel on the left was the kind of thing my sister would have put on.
“Dawn seems kind of early,” I said. I was checking-in to the Hotel Borealis for seven nights and had been looking forward to a week of rest; lazy days sitting on the terraces that overlooked the red sands of the Sonora Desert, quiet evenings in the bars of the hotel, and maybe a night or two at the casino. Having to wake up before dawn just for breakfast didn’t fit with my agenda.
“Ok boomer,” she said. “This is your room key — it’s electronic. Place it against the plate on the door and wait for the beep. There’s a light that will flash green…” I stopped listening. I knew how hotel keys worked and my booking was for a suite with the mini-bar prepaid so there really wasn’t much she could say that interested me. I wondered if I’d be able to make a decent Old Fashioned from the mini-bar or if I’d have to call down to room service. “…in the event of a fire.” She finished and half-smiled at me.
“Thanks,” I said. She looked slightly surprised and I wondered if she’d slipped some more ‘ok boomer’ like comments into her little spiel. “What was the room number again?”
“413,” she said, pointing at the little white card containing my room keycard and a slip of paper bearing the wifi password. Where the number should have been written was empty space, which she realised at the same time as I did. “Let me write that down for you, in case of memory loss,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said again, with less sincerity.
The suite was three rooms: a bathroom with an actual bidet — something I assumed had gone the way of the dinosaurs by now — and a Japanese toilet with more functions than my smartphone; a bedroom with the expected kingsize bed that could sleep at least three people plus their dogs; and a sitting room that was slightly overcrowded with overstuffed furniture. The armchairs bulged and the couch positively lounged and sitting on any of them was like sitting down on a cloud; after a moment you’d forgotten you were sitting at all and felt like you were just being somehow supported in the air by fluffiness. Getting up proved trickier and I resorted to just rolling off the couch onto the floor and navigating my way up from a solid surface. All of these faced the huge, plate-glass picture window that looked out on to the Sonora Desert.
Behind the couch, facing away from the window, was a desk and stiff-backed chair. I considered moving the chair around to the other side of the desk so that I could see out of the window from there too, but it seemed like too much effort. I wasn’t intending to spend all that much time at a desk anyway.
The borealis woke me at 2am. I had drawn the curtains across the window before going to bed, and they were floor-length, heavy, weighted curtains of a thick brown material that drank in the light and suffocated it until the room was pitch black. The noise — the strobing hum that seemed to sweep across the room, bounce off the walls and arc back again, throbbing against the bed, was the culprit. I sat up, unable to see anything and feeling disoriented, wondering where on earth I was. Slowly I remembered that I was in the hotel, though that didn’t explain the noise, and I fumbled for the bed-side light-switch.
Instead of the lights I found the switch for opening and closing the curtains and, with a stately whoosh, they drew apart letting greenish-yellow light flicker in from the sitting room. Thoroughly confused now, I got out of bed and went to the door, convinced that the room lighting had come on anyway but was somehow faulty, and was greeted in the doorway by the borealis in full, glorious performance through the plate-glass window.
It’s not June, I murmured to myself. The hotel’s brochures were quite definite on the borealis only being visible in June. I expected that the hotel staff had any number of disgruntled idiot customers at other times of the year who did little more than reveal their illiteracy to the receptionist (and probably escalated it to the manager; what else would an idiot do when proven wrong?) regarding the borealis. And yet… here I was, being inconvenienced by something I’d deliberately intended to avoid.
The shimmer of the light across the sky was mesmerising though, and the Sonora Desert below it responded; glittering and shining, reflecting back the light from the electromagnetic interactions above and creating odd illusions: a monstrous creature here seemed to stalk westwards towards the columns of an ancient city; then it collapsed into the ripples of a vast ocean on which sailed boats with strange-shaped sails. Despite myself I moved towards the couch and sat down, transfixed by the display.
At 5:30 the borealis ended and darkness settled back over the cold sands. The stars twinkled slowly back into view as my night-vision restored, and my stomach rumbled. With a sigh I reached for the phone.
“Room service? Yes, I’d like to order breakfast please….”
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