The West Window

Here is the intelligence I paid for with four days of rail and will now give away for free: at the Beijing Hotel, ask for a west room, high up. The corridor is long, the key is heavy, and then the door opens and the Forbidden City is simply there, below your window, six hundred years of golden roofs arranged for one tired guest as if room service had brought them up.

What the photograph shows is the honest version of arrival, and I have decided this page keeps honest versions. The backpack went to the floor with the finality of a dropped argument. Most of my clothes followed it, four days of road and rail being a smell as much as a distance. And then I lay down on my stomach across that enormous bed, chin on my arms, glasses somewhere in the bedding, and looked. Just looked. The emperors built themselves a city inside the city, and I could not manage the three meters to the armchairs.

I stayed like that while the haze went from white to gold, doing an inventory of my remaining faculties and finding none fit for duty. Below the sill lay the biggest secret of the old world, roof after roof after roof. It kept until morning. Secrets that have kept for six centuries are patient with a woman who needs a bath and twelve hours of sleep, in that order, and honestly the order is negotiable.