Chapter 11: Life After Death

Over the following weeks, Andrew settled into the hotel’s routine. Along with his regular morning sex with Céline, he followed her to the kitchen and helped prepare and serve the meals. He even showed her a few of his mother’s recipes, which were warmly received by the other guests.

Ella satisfied herself with Jean. To her, he was the ideal of manliness, as she climbed on his body as if it were the trees he liked to fell. At times, though, she liked variety, so she took Jonah aside for some oral and anal fun.

From the beginning, Lawson’s Hotel offered a library. As each new guest arrived, the shelves expanded with “contemporary” volumes of all types (fiction and non-fiction). After Ella arrived (from 1920) Jonah read everything he could about “his” war and the end of slavery, and about the first World War in Ella’s time. And when the Dureaux siblings arrived, the horrors of the second World War were included in the library as well.

As he experienced it, Jonah was only months away from his death in the carnage of the Civil War. He still felt the misery of that experience, with what Andrew knew as post-traumatic stress disorder.

But Jonah was fascinated by the vast expansion of knowledge since his time. Electricity, radio, automobiles, aircraft, medicine, an endless list of wonders. When Céline had arrived he spent days marveling at the cold food box that she called a “fridge.” By contrast, when the Dureaux siblings had explained the new kitchen appliances to Beth, she just grinned and said, “let me at ‘em.” Horace goggled and walked away, muttering “Sorcery!”

Andrew had been anticipating his time at university. In school he had been a dedicated student (and a fast reader) who took satisfaction from both fiction and non-fiction. Every day he took time to read in the hotel library, during those times when he was apart from Céline.