The desk clerks were expecting me, three of them, very bright eyed. The lobby was bright. The colors of the chairs were bright. The whole thing gave me a headache.
“I’m told I have a room waiting,” I said, and looked at the carpet, red with orange fish dancing across a shimmering sea.
“Welcome.” Three clerks, three heads bobbing in unison.
The first of them put a piece of paper on the counter and waved a pen. “Check the information and then sign, if you please. You’re staying with us for six nights?”
“Who said I’m staying here six nights?” I signed the form without glancing at it. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
The oldest of the trio nodded vigorously and gave me a little folder with a plastic card in it. “This is your room key. Room Twelve Nineteen, that’s on the twelfth floor. Breakfast starts at six thirty on the second floor.” He delicately indicated the second floor, his arm extended just so. “And the bar is downstairs, to the left.” Also delicately indicated.
“Your luggage is arriving later?” The third of the trio was pretty, like a little bird. She might at any moment, I thought, break out in chirps and whistles.
“No luggage. I was told?… never mind.” Since when did I explain myself to hotel front desks?
The bird rang a small bell; a young man in a tight-fitting yellow uniform appeared next to me. He put out his hand, which I shook. “How do you do?” I said.
He looked at the trio and then at me. “Hand over the key card. I’ll take you to your room.”
“No need,” I said. “I know my way around these places.”
“Sure,” the young man said. “All the same, it would be my pleasure.”
I shuddered inwardly. Unctuousness and neon-a killer combination I had thought would never make it this far up the peninsula, not to Pyongyang. I looked around. The lobby had a few chairs in one corner and a potted plant in another. Along the front wall, near the revolving glass door, was a single chair. Slumped in it was a man wearing a cheap suit and a vacant expression. He had the look of someone doomed forever to stare into morning fog off an empty coast. His eyes took me in, but I wasn’t sure what had registered. It was all getting to be unnerving-the streetlights, the lobby, this man staring into nothing. Maybe Li was right. Maybe I really didn’t know as much as I thought I once did. Maybe I didn’t know anything anymore.