The guest lecturer, I could feel, was looking at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. Look, I asked myself sternly, is this an investigation of a death? Or not?

I watched with a feeling of detachment as my own hand released itself from the steering wheel and came to rest on top of the guest lecturer’s, covering it like a shell on a snail. To have done so felt nothing short of heroic, as though with this one gesture I had swept all the stars and the moon from the sky. Then I brought my gaze to meet hers, and lifted the corners of my mouth in a smile.

“I would like that very much,” I said.

“Isn’t this lobby bizarre?” whispered the guest lecturer, as we stepped across the threshold.

It was, and in a way I had not expected. To begin with, its entire visible staff (besides the bellhop outside) seemed to consist of one dark-haired young man, a small and fastidious-looking person, who nodded politely to the guest lecturer as she tottered by, aiming a little wave of her fingertips in his direction.

But stranger by far was the look of the lobby, which was incongruously ultra-modern, as if someone who had never seen the outside of the building had ordered up an interior design scheme from some other hotel, one located in some sleek metropolis. Everything was hushed and dimly lit. On our right, white leather donut-shaped couches curved around low black tables, and on our left was a long, narrow bar that had been lined with a row of tiny red votive candles.

There were about half a dozen seats at the bar, all of them empty, nor was there any sign of a bartender, though liquor bottles were lined up against the mirrored wall, and clean glasses gleamed brightly from their shelves. Nothing about the place—I looked around me once more, noting the scentlessness of the air, the soft, piped-in music—had any specificity. The guest lecturer and I could have been making our way across a lobby in London or Dubai; there was no way of knowing in what larger geographical region we would find ourselves if we stepped outside.

“A lot of controversy,” the guest lecturer was saying, “about it opening. Did you hear about that?”

I shook my head. I had not heard about any controversy; I had not heard anything about this hotel at all. I was not even aware that it had opened, but that did not trouble me in the slightest. Even if I had been, I would not have been interested in discussing it with the guest lecturer. No! All I wanted, in that particular moment, was a little quiet in which a new thought could take form. My own father had walked here—exactly here, where I was walking!—from the front door of the Old Mission Hotel through the lobby to the elevator.