When I was a boy, my father owned a hotel in the center of a medieval town in the Alps. And something happened, I still don’t know what, or if it was just a dream, but I remember that news came over the radio and my father packed us all up and told us we were going to live in the hotel for a while. He had the driver come and pick us up, and had a van packed with all our things, and he, my mom and I moved into the hotel.
The hotel was vast and ancient. I had played there often while my father ran things from the penthouse suite which was also his office. But this time each of us had his own room. This was the first time I had ever had my own room. I slept alone in a huge bed meant for two adults. I had my skateboard and my bicycle and my skis, and my roller skates.
The town, which had always been full of tourists from all over the world who came to see the Golden roof, this really old building that everyone took pictures of, and men stood on the balcony of it and played brass instruments at Christmas time. But it was all mine now.
I asked my father why we were living in the hotel with nobody else in it and he said it was the virus. I didn’t understand that. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t like living in our house. I liked it at the hotel where people were always coming in with their luggage, people from all over the world, people dressed in a million different ways.
Now there were no people in the town and my father was always working and my mother got sick. Then my father got sick and then everyone in the town got sick and I didn’t know why but they all died. They all died and men came to take them away but when they came I hid. I had found the best hiding spot so I hid when they came and I ate food from the huge hotel kitchen and I must assume several days went by and I was in some kind of state of shock, I must have been. And then after many days of silence in the empty town, after so many bodies were taken away by men in masks and space suits, I came out into the empty street and started calling out. Another child came out from behind the door of the rival hotel. And a child came out from the luggage store and another from the art gallery, and from the restaurants and bakeries and appliance stores and all over the town, children appeared, children who had been abandoned or whose parents had died, or both, and I invited the children into the empty hotel and showed them the kitchen, and we stood on chairs and carried pots two or three of us to a pot, and we cooked and ate in the huge empty dining room. And this went on for three months. For three months we children lived and formed a country. We decided our country had no name and no laws.
And then something happened and I will never understand what it was. Something happened and I was taken away from the town and I went to a place, a very large place, like a hotel, along with all the other kids, and each of us was given to an adult, or a pair of adults, and we were taken all over the world with them, and we never saw each other again, and I have never been told what that was all about, but I think it was the happiest time of my life, and when I went back to the town as an adult man I saw that our family’s hotel had been leveled, that hotel that had served many kings and queens since the thirteenth century was not there anymore, in fact the whole town was gone, and that made me sad, but remembering my time alone in the old empty city, that made me so happy that I stood by the only remaining lamp post in the city and cried with joy.
