few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness. Almost no one.” Raphael leaned back in his chair with a little smile, presumably hoping that Walter might ask what he meant, but Walter waited him out. “At least, not the people who stay in five-star hotels,” Raphael said. “Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. The point here”—he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure—“is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.”
“How do you bring in guests and supplies?” Walter was having some difficulty grasping the appeal of the place. It was undeniably beautiful but geographically inconvenient, and he wasn’t sure why your average executive would want to vacation in a cellular dead zone.
“On a speedboat. It’s fifteen minutes from the town of Grace Harbour.”
“I see. Aside from the undeniable natural beauty,” Walter said, trying a different tack, “would you say there’s a distinguishing factor that sets this hotel apart from similar properties?”
“I was hoping you’d ask me that. The answer’s yes. There’s a sense of being outside of time and space.”
“Outside of…?”
“A figure of speech, but it’s not far off.” Raphael loved the hotel, Walter could see that. “The truth of the matter is, there’s a certain demographic that will pay a great deal of money to escape temporarily from the modern world.”
Later, walking home through the autumn night, temporary escape from the world was an idea that Walter couldn’t let go. In those days he was renting a cramped one-bedroom on a street that felt somehow between neighborhoods. It was the most depressing apartment he’d ever seen, which for reasons he refused to articulate was why he’d chosen it. Elsewhere in the city, the ballet dancer to whom Walter had been engaged until two months ago was setting up house with a lawyer.
Walter stopped into the usual grocery store on his way home that evening, and the thought of stopping into this store again tomorrow, and then the day after that, and then the day after that, slow strolls down the frozen-food aisle interspersed with shifts at the hotel where he’d been working for the past decade, a day older every time, the city closing in around him, well, it was unbearable, actually. He placed a package of frozen corn in his basket. What if this was the last time he ever performed this action, here in this particular store? It was an appealing thought.
He’d been with the ballet dancer for twelve years. He hadn’t seen the breakup coming. He’d agreed with his friends that he shouldn’t make any sudden moves. But what he wanted in those days was to disappear, and by the time he reached the checkout counter he realized that he’d made his decision. He accepted the position; arrangements were made; on the appointed day a month later he flew to Vancouver and then caught a connecting flight to Nanaimo on a twenty-four-seat prop plane that barely reached the clouds before descending, spent the night in a hotel, and set off the next day for the Hotel Caiette. He could have saved considerable time by flying into one of the tiny airports further north, but he wanted to see more of Vancouver Island.
It was a cold day in November, clouds low overhead. He drove north in a gray rental car through a series of gray towns with a gray sea intermittently visible on his right, a landscape of dark trees and McDonald’s drive-throughs and big-box stores under a leaden sky. He arrived at last in the town of Port Hardy, streets dim in the rain, where he got lost for a while before he found the place to return the rental car. He called the town’s only taxi service and waited a half hour until an old man arrived in a beat-up station wagon that reeked of cigarette smoke.
“You’re headed to the hotel?” the driver asked when Walter requested a ride to Grace Harbour.
“I am,” Walter said, but found that he didn’t particularly feel like making conversation after all of these hours of traveling in solitude. They drove in silence through the forest until they reached the village of Grace Harbour, such