Featured hotel: The Dorian
Written by: Katherine Moffat
Three smiles greeted me at reception. I didn’t notice the fourth gaze until I turned around.
The portrait hung just inside the entrance, watching the door. He looked young, like he’d had a pretty good paper round. Seemingly minimal sins to be concerned with. The Dorian’s digital Dorian Gray shifts based on guest confessions: submit your secrets anonymously, let strangers judge them, watch the portrait wither or thrive accordingly. A sort of moral TripAdvisor, if you will.
The receptionist asked if I’d read the book.
“Yes,” I said.
I had not.
The lie came out too easily. I’m a writer – or at least that’s what I put on customs forms – and here I was, nodding along about Oscar Wilde like a student who’d memorised the back cover on the bus. Why did I lie? Fear of seeming unprepared? Or worse, not a real writer? The copy waiting on my bedside table would make avoiding it difficult. I made a mental note to actually read the novel.
The minibar was all craft gin and local spirits – not a pack of sad Pringles to be seen. Temptation by design. The hotel giveth, then the hotel judgeth.
That evening, I scanned the QR code and confessed.
The interface was simple: a text box and a promise of anonymity. I typed something about lying at check-in, about wanting to seem credible. Trivial, really. I pressed send before I could overthink it, which if you know me, is a miracle in itself.
Within minutes, I received a stranger’s secret to judge. Theirs carried about the same weight as my small literary fraud. Here I was, fretting about a white lie to a receptionist. I settled on something in the middle. The moral equivalent of a shrug. Somewhere else in the hotel, a stranger was likely doing the same to me.
Later, upstairs at the rooftop bar, locals chatted about ice hockey and AI while I nursed a drink and thought about the portrait downstairs. I knew enough (after a bit of quick research) to know that in the novel, Dorian hides his portrait in the attic because it shows his true, corrupted self. Here, in The Dorian, it hangs in the lobby for everyone to see. Progress, right? Secrets confronted rather than concealed. But we’re still anonymous. Still masked. We get the catharsis of confession without any of the risk.
Wilde wrote that man is least himself when he speaks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.
The Dorian gave me a mask. I told the truth. I’m just not sure I was honest.
At checkout, Dorian looked terrible. So much for the good paper round. Evidently, we’d all been busy.
I still haven’t read the book.
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