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Notebook An Edwardian death room By Andrei Codrescu People report ghosts at the Colonial Burma Hotel and Spa in Eureka Springs, Ark. The lumbering rooming house served as a Civil War hospital, a miracle spa for dying cancer patients from Kansas, a tuberculosis sanatorium, an abandoned building, a losing investment for the St. Louis mafia and, in its present incarnation, a romantic destination for Arkansans and Missourians desirous of rekindling romance through the use of pedicures and herbal wraps. The fourth-floor corner room we hired looked over verdant hills through painted-shut windows. A wasp was trying desperately to get out into those promising hills, but like a metaphor of previous residents, it kept hurling itself hopelessly against the glass. The walls were done in thick swirling rusty paint of flaked blood, bordered by baby-puke green. Embedded in the rusty blood was a sprinkling of gold blobs that may have been intended as stars but were in fact gobs of sputum hurled there by coughing moribunds. In 1937, Dr. Carr, who had been the most prominent dealer of snake-oil to the dying at the Colonial Burma, was eventually arrested for fraud and sent to Leavenworth, but not before giving this hoary Edwardian monument its permanent connection to agonizing death. There is a lovely lounge on the fourth floor bearing his name. Judging by the ages and girth of the lobby-loungers hoping for romance-rekindling, many of them were working with wet matches in a downpour and some sorry-looking twigs. Still, you can’t underestimate the power of a peach bubble bath, or that of a pedicure, for that matter. A nurse-therapist smiled wanly as she went back into the spa after a soul-restoring Marlboro in the 85-degree humid sunshine outside. The smell of sweat and smoke wafted from her. She looked a bit like the woman in the print above the bed, an art-nouveau damsel gazing at a brightly flowering bush that distracted the casual viewer from noticing her elegant fingers buried candidly between her thighs twixt the flowing folds of her dress. Surfeited by humanity, I turned on my computer. The Internet bars came on, indicating the presence of Wi-Fi, a good sign. The only thing is, the bars were purple, something I’d never seen. I Googled Dr. Carr, and my screen filled immediately with purplish e-mail addresses. Here are some of them: Asmith@death.com, Mprice@death.com, Earlyseth@death.com. There wasn’t a Yahoo or Gmail or AOL address among them, and I had the feeling that death.com was a server that preceded all of them somehow. I had tapped into a whole other Internet, a secret intranet perhaps, that listed the e-mail addresses of dead people. Did you have to be dead to communicate with these people? I typed a brief message for Asmith@death.com, and I didn’t have to wait long for the answer. Next week I will reveal what Asmith wrote. Be prepared to get the willies.
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