Cemetery of the Forgotten

Some there are who go to The Ravenna Hotel in order to forget themselves. They arrive, for preference, in antique conveyances: flies, hansoms, broughams, phaetons, fiacres and traps. They are conspicuous in this and in their having no luggage. It is said that they are in flight from an insupportable nervous strain, from which they find temporary assuagement only in sleep. It is true that they arrive asleep and remain so for several days. But this incapacity of the guests presents hotel employees with no special inconvenience. They discreetly "manage it," using a side entrance and elevator kept for the use of sleeping arrivals and their attendants (for the former never arrive without a ministering escort retained in their behalf, beforehand). It is also true that the "sleepers," as they are called, almost always arrive late at night, when the porte-cochere, lobby, and meeting room are desolate. Should one meet a sleeper as he is being bundled into the elevator by a discreet and sensitive attendant, the encounter will be "as if it had never occurred"; for all who come here know, instinctively or otherwise, that The Ravenna Hotel furthers the interests of sybarites and those in extremis, equally.

That very night, the night of a sleeper’s arrival, the hotel photographer is summoned. (He has a windowless room in the hotel, which serves also as his darkroom.) At this hour, he is on call and appears alacritously, with an old-fashioned camera and tripod, dressed "to the 9’s"; the reason for his fastidiousness, given the insensibility of the subject, is another of the hotel’s many enigmas. The photograph is quickly accomplished -- an efficiency also enjoyed by forensic photographers, who never tire of remarking on "the vast stillness of the scene." It is then, during the photographing of the guest, supine on a freshly laundered and ironed sheet and pillowslip, that the transference is effected. And it is for this moment that the sleeper has come. Now is the moment of his great assuagement when the turbulent self is calmed, eased, brought finally into a condition of equanimity through the loss of self. (The beneficent "forgetting" advertised in the hotel’s brochure.)

A day or two pass, and that sleep, so profound and mortal in which the guest first arrived, becomes a refreshment. The sleeper dreams (many times of childhood) and wakes with a good appetite. He will usually take a room at the front of the hotel, facing the sea, and can be seen engaging his fellow guests (those who are awake) in the usual games of a resort: shuffleboard, pinochle, tennis, and mechanical horse races. Small, quiet adulteries are also favored. The last duty of the paid escort is to go into town and purchase, for his former patient, the clothing and sundries he failed to bring (uncertain in his duress of the prevailing mood to which he would awake).

How, you ask, is the transference effected? No one is certain how. Let it suffice to say that the distressed self passes into the film and is imprisoned there (in the same way the Amish believe the camera has power to steal the soul). At the end of the erstwhile sleeper’s stay, the photographer seeks him out, as an ordinary hotel photographer might do, in order to sell a departing guest souvenir snapshots. The guest is allowed to "buy back" his self (or any other word you prefer, such as immanence or being or ego); or he may, if he prefers, pay to have it permanently forgotten. Most, fearing the return of their old agony, choose the latter, in spite of the expense; and there are many unmarked graves in the old cemetery behind the hotel in which are interred tightly furled rolls of film.