Things happen in hotels. The staff is used to that. How many arguments have they witnessed? How many fist fights? How many sleepwalkers padding through the lobby in their pyjamas? How many people trying to smuggle towels and linens out in their luggage? But these things pass, and in just that way tonight’s disruptions have passed. The Xanadu has returned to normal. Humming. Swishing. Bleeping softly. On the seventh floor, most of the guests are still out or already asleep – except in Room 803. In Room 803 nothing has returned to normal, and there is a strong suspicion among its occupants that it never will.
Gabriela and Delila are on one bed; Beth and Lucinda are across from them. There are several minutes of an eerie, so-this-is-what-trench-warfare-is-really-like silence when they first sit down, while the four of them just stare at each other. Delila and Lucinda look awkward and slightly embarrassed, but Beth and Gabriela look merely stupefied.
Gabriela is the first to speak. “Wow, this is so weird.” She points at Beth. “I mean, OMG! You are me! You really are!”
And vice versa, of course.
“It’s spooky,” says Beth. “Talk about putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. I’m sitting over there next to Delila, but I’m not. I’m sitting over here next to Lucinda.”
“Can’t we talk about something else?” asks Lucinda. “You two are creeping me out.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” says Gabriela, with exaggerated sweetness. “We certainly don’t want to upset you.”
“OK, OK, I know it’s worse for you,” says Lucinda. “I just meant—”
“The thing is, what else is there to talk about?” asks Delila. “The weather? What we had for supper? I mean, it’s kind of like what my granddad calls the tank-in-the-room syndrome, isn’t it? You can pretend there isn’t a tank in the room, but it’s there. And, man, it is really big and it’s heavily armed.”
“But it’s not going to do any good talking about it,” Lucinda argues. “I mean, it happened. But you don’t know how. So you just have to hope that it unhappens. You know, eventually. You guys just have to wait till it does. There’s nothing you can do, is there?”
“Oh no, you’re wrong. There are dozens of things we can do,” says Beth. “We can snap our fingers. Or chant a magic spell. Or pray to our guardian angels…” Her sigh sounds like something breaking. “We just thought it’d be more fun to see how much we could mess up each others’ lives.”
Gabriela groans. “Oh, God… How did you know?”
“How did I know what?”
Gabriela looks over at Delila, but Delila is gazing at her feet as though she’s never seen them before. “Well…” Gabriela, too, is suddenly fascinated by Delila’s feet. “I haven’t exactly been doing a great job of being you.” She gives Beth a wan smile. “It’s a hell of a lot harder than it looks.”
“It can’t be as hard as being you,” says Beth. No dangerous clothes, no tricky make-up, no physical exertion. All she really has to do is just be: go to meals; go to museums; watch a play. She may not be gaining her any points, but, realistically, just how many could Gabriela be losing her? “What does not exactly a great job mean?”
“It means Professor Gryck’s really mad at you.” Gabriela’s whole face squints, as if a very strong sun is in her eyes. “She thinks you’re deliberately trying to ruin her big weekend.”
“Me?” How is that possible? The girl across from her – herself – looks exactly as Beth is: meek and obedient; afraid to talk back to a recorded announcement. “What have I done?”
“You mean what haven’t you done,” mutters Delila.
“It’s not like I meant to do any of this stuff.” Gabriela’s foot swings back and forth. “It just kind of happened. It’s, like, mainly I’m a victim.”
And so the whole tragic chain of events that is today is unwound. The miscalculations. The sudden impulses. The mistakes. The things that were so not her fault. “Plus, your mother thought you were kidnapped,” Gabriela finishes. “But I think I got that all straightened out.” She finally looks Beth – looks herself – in the eye. “I’m really sorry.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” says the girl who only twenty-four hours ago thought everything mattered – that every single thing in the universe was out to get her. “Besides, I haven’t been doing too well as you, either.” Now Beth’s smile takes on a certain wanness. “I seriously doubt that Professor Gryck is more angry than Taffeta.”
“Taffeta Mackenzie?” Gabriela’s image of Taffeta from the night before is of a charming, smiling, laughing woman wearing an awesome cocktail dress and Cartier jewellery. “Taffeta’s mad at me?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” says Beth.
Lucinda rolls her eyes.
“It wasn’t so bad to start with,” Beth explains. “At first she just thought I was a klutz and kind of a clown. And she wasn’t even that upset about us losing the others and getting on the bus and everything.”
“Or about the police,” says Lucinda helpfully. “My mom would’ve gone ballistic if I came home in a cop car, but Taffeta was pretty cool. I figure that kind of thing happens a lot in LA.”
“More often than you think,” says Gabriela. And, although she hadn’t planned to mention this part of her story, she explains about Joe and taking the short cut through his property, and being picked up by the police. “That kind of did it for me and Professor Gryck,” she finishes.
“It was the party tonight that did it for me and Taffeta,” Beth admits. “It started out great. She thought I looked fantastic and everything was OK again but then it all fell apart in a pretty spectacular way. I think I really—” She searches for the right words to describe how things now stand between Taffeta and her. “I really nuked the last remaining shred of goodwill.”
“Oh, God…” groans Gabriela. “It’s really that bad?”
Beth nods. “She lost it in a major way.”
“You can say that again,” agrees Lucinda. “You could’ve boiled a pot of water on her head she was so mad.”
To explain what happened at the party, Beth first has to explain about the man who’s been following her from the moment they left the hotel this morning.
“I don’t know how he did it, but I swear that everywhere we went, there he was. It’s as if he planted some kind of homing device on me.”
“Only the rest of us never saw him,” puts in Lucinda. And then, catching the look Beth gives her, adds, “I’m not saying I don’t believe Ga— Beth. I’m just saying we never saw him.”
“Because he can vanish into the air,” says Beth. “And then tonight, there he was at the party. Pretending to be a waiter. Handing out the spring rolls. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t help it. I panicked.” And brought down two waiters, one tray of smoked salmon, one tray of empty glasses and the fashion editor of The Los Angeles Times. “If I mess up tomorrow, it won’t matter if we ever get back to our own bodies. You’ll never work in fashion unless you change your name and move to Milan.”
Gabriela smiles glumly. “I think you might have to do something similar. Or write anonymously.”
“Maybe you should both get ill,” suggests Delila. “Migraines all round.”
“That’s a good idea,” says Lucinda. “I mean, it’s not like anybody’s going to be devastated if either of you doesn’t show up. They’ll probably dance for joy.”
“Not Professor Gryck,” says Delila. “She doesn’t really strike me as much of a dancer. But she might click her heels together with a big smile on her face.”
Gabriela moans. “This was going to be my major moment! I worked so hard. I was going to see my design modeled at a real fashion show. And I was so sure I was going to win the scholarship and maybe even get an internship in the summer…”
“Well, so was I. But if Professor Gryck thinks I’m trying to ruin her big weekend—”
Beth leans back on her elbows.
Gabriela rests her chin on her hands. “And Taffeta thinks I’m nuts.”
“Let’s not forget the part about something being bound to go wrong,” says Delila.
“That’s right.” Lucinda nods. “I mean, what if he shows up at the fashion show? What if you panic and bring down everybody on the runway or something like that?”
Beth groans, but Gabriela raises her head with a thoughtful, what-would-really-set-off-this-blouse look in her eyes. “But I wouldn’t.” She looks from one to the other. “I don’t know this guy. I couldn’t tell the difference between him and a shoe salesman in Omaha. He hasn’t been following me.”
“But he has been following you—” Beth breaks off. “Oh. You mean…”
“Exactly. I dress as me. And you dress as you. We switch back! Manually. We’ll still be in the wrong bodies, but we’ll make them look as much like we really look as we can. So you can go to your writers’ thing and I can go to the fashion show.” She beams. “It solves all our problems.”
“But what about next week?” asks Beth.
Gabriela screws up her mouth for a second. “At least as far as this weekend goes, it solves all our problems. We can worry about next week after this is over.” She hugs herself. “Oh, Cinderella, you shall go to the ball…”
Shortly after midnight, it suddenly starts to rain. This is a surprise rain, unpredicted by any of the sophisticated weather forecasts for the area, and it falls so fiercely and thickly that the lights of the city seem to dim and instead of waking people it drives them deeper into sleep as if they’re crawling into a cave for safety.
Otto and his migraine have gone to bed, but Remedios stands at the sliding glass doors of the terrace, staring into the night. Thunder rolls down from the mountains – an avalanche of sound. Spears of light rip open the preternatural darkness. If you saw her there, you’d see a young woman in a striped cotton nightshirt and fluffy slippers watching a storm, but, of course, that is not who or what Remedios really is. She is formless and timeless; a traveller of centuries and galaxies; as real as light, as luminous as hope.
She is holding something in her hand and as another volley of thunder moves towards the valley, she takes her eyes from the glass to look at it. Sitting on her palm is the small clay figure of a dancer. A thousand years ago, when it was made, it was brightly painted and wore feathers and a tiny necklace made of shells. Then, if you looked at it long enough, it seemed to move; if you held it up against the sky, it seemed to shimmer with the stars. The shells and feathers and paint are all long gone, but as a wave of lightning bleaches the sky, the tiny figure shifts with the drumming of the rain. “The universe always seeks balance…” Remedios murmurs to the dancer. “That’s why it’s always changing.”
Another wash of purple light illuminates the skyline.
“Right now it looks like it’s seeking revenge,” says Otto from behind her.
She doesn’t turn round.
“Everything’s going really wrong, Remedios.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” He stands beside her, but what Otto sees as he looks out at the watery night is not what Remedios sees. “I don’t see that there’s any maybe about it.”
Remedios folds her hand around the dancer. If something is off-balance, it can only be righted by movement.
“You started this, Remedios,” says Otto. “And you have to end it. You can’t let them go into those award ceremonies tomorrow as someone they’re not. You have to straighten it all out.”
A breaker of rain smashes against the terrace doors.
“I will,” says Remedios. “But I’ll need your help.”