Excerpt: The Anasazi Hotel

“I don’t get it,” Magellan says. Our young, energetic and preternaturally cheerful traveling companion shifts in his rigging to query me. “You pay extra to be out in the heat, in a ruin? No A/C? Are you shitting me?”

Eckbo makes a subtle gesture in my direction, one that in the context of our decades-long partnership says, “this one’s all for you, bud.”

Joy.

“You ever hear the term wabi sabi?”

“That like kemo sabe?”

“No,” I say patiently, “not even the same language. Although, help me out here, Eckbo, didn’t it turn out that Tonto…wasn’t he taking the pee out of the Lone Ranger? I heard kemo sabe means ‘doofus’ or something—“

“I am not the master of ancient television shows,” Eckbo says. "You’re on your own, man.”

“But Eckbo—“

“No.” He drops his glasses for a second and I catch the look in his eyes, very peeved, very Klingon.

“Okay. Be easy. Peace between elves and men,” I say wearily. “It’s been a long trip.” I reach for the canister, pull another WetWipe—it sticks in the jaws of the canister and I have to wrestle it free—and I mop my face. “OK, Magellan, wabi sabi goes like this. You take something beautiful and you break it.”

“Huh?”

“Or you take something old and kind of wracked out and you learn to admire it. You find some depth of feeling in it, that’s better than young and beautiful and perfect. You dig the flaws, because life is in the failed beauty, not the complete beauty. Got it?”

“Not, ah, not sure,” Magellan says, with the air of someone who thinks he might be failing his job interview. His smile sparkles a little too brightly and his eyes glisten. Poor fucker.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Some people like it hard, that’s all.”

“Wait,” Magellan says with a flash of lucidity, “it’s like cheese.”

“It’s like cheese,” I repeat uncertainly.

“It’s like cheese,” he says, his confidence growing. He is clearly on his home ground, now. “Like bleu cheese. Or Roquefort, that’s even better. It’s an acquired taste, right? You think about it, you’re eating mold. It’s moldy cheese. And it’s a delicacy. Or wine. It’s basically grape juice that’s gotten all spoiled and fermented and been stored in a tub for, like, a year. But we dig it. We appreciate it. We think it’s cooler than grape juice. Right? That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Um, yeah,” I say, impressed despite myself, “that’s a pretty good gloss on wabi sabi, actually. The Japanese invented wabi sabi and have been doing it for fuckyears. It even got into their hotel-going experience, see? So before Western people started crawling all over that country, fancy dudes would stay in guest houses called ryokans, and it was pretty strenuous.

“I mean, it sounds great at first, right? You show up at this place and the whole crew comes out to meet you and they bow and you get to take your shoes off right away—very important—and they whisk you off somewhere and you get right into a bathrobe and have a snack and then have a bath. I realize this sounds pretty much like heaven on earth.” Eckbo gives me a sharp look, and Magellan looks slightly puzzled, like he might be about to open his mouth and suggest that, well, no, it didn’t sound like paradise to him. Very strange: no shoes, hot bath, and snacks is pretty much what is on Findzeit’s Heaven’s Resume. “OK, at any rate it sounds restful, right? Wrong. You have to make sure your shoes are pointing the right way and that your bathrobe is belted the right way. You have to sit on your knees with your back straight and eat your snack foods at exactly the right time, in exactly the right order. You have to be, like, ritually cleansed before you get in the bath. It sucks. Well, no, it doesn’t suck, it’s awesome…” my eyes glaze over for a second—“but it’s not easy. You’re working your ass off throughout the experience. It’s not a cakewalk, see?”

“There’s no cable at the Anasazi Hotel?” Magellan asks dubiously.

“There’s no cable,” I confirm, “at the Anasazi Hotel.”

“I don’t know,” Magellan says, “on second thought it just sounds weird.”