The Resort by Sol Stein

dinner?”
    “I was thinking of all of us.”
    “Oh. You’re allowed to socialize with the guests?”
    “Please don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Brown. It’s part of my job.”
    “I’ll forego a drink tonight,” Henry said.
    “I agree,” Margaret said, who liked a predinner drink even more than Henry did.
    “I see,” Clete said.
    He seems hurt, thought Henry, as if we were being rude to him. He felt suddenly as if he were in a foreign country, trying to pick up the customs.
    “Look,” Clete said affably. “Let’s be realistic. You have to eat, right?”
    Henry’s gaze wandered. There was no fence that he could see. No guards, guns, nothing of that sort. Everything looked so normal.
    “If you’re thinking of running away,” Clete said, “that’s perfectly okay with me, as long as it’s just thinking. You need energy to run away. You need energy to live. There’s no place else to get food than the dining room.”
    One eyelid lowered, Clete looked at Margaret. “You are thinking you might rather skip the meal and go hungry.”
    “Exactly,” Margaret said.
    “Three squares a day, Doctor.”
    “No harm in skipping a meal once in a while,” Margaret said.
    “Ah, but if you thought that tomorrow you might not get any food at all…” Clete stopped to observe their reaction, then continued, “No breakfast, no dinner, no anything, you might not want to skip your meal tonight. It’s just logical.”
    “Is that a threat?” Henry asked.
    “Oh Mr. Brown, we don’t make threats around this place. Please be reasonable and come to dinner before the kitchen closes down. I intend to eat. If you don’t want to eat, you can just sit there and watch me.”
    He went on ahead.
    Why is he so cocksure that we won’t just walk out of here? Henry thought. He noticed Margaret’s shoes. If only she hadn’t changed from her walking shoes. “What do you say, Margaret?”
    Clete was now well ahead of them.
    “He’s certainly got self-confidence,” Margaret said.
    “He knows a lot that we don’t yet know,” Henry said, remembering, as he did in times of stress, the words of his father, telling him that the role of a man was to keep his senses and intelligence tuned to the nuances of events so that in the event of danger he could walk faster, turn a corner, look up in time, do something that would by his conscious act avert catastrophe. Look both ways before crossing the street. Watch out for incompetent drivers, drive defensively.
    “Coming?” Clete called.
    Henry made up his mind. “We might as well eat.”
    “If you say so,” Margaret said.
    “You don’t sound as if you agree we should. We’ll be out of this place in no time.”
    “I’m sure of that,” Margaret said, her voice less certain than her words. “It’s just that I can’t believe we are voluntarily following him.”
    The path to the restaurant crossed the road they had come up on. Henry glanced to his right. He could see no one in the sentry box. Were they expecting no more guests this evening? Did they need no traffic control for the one-way road? When they had a new order-processing problem at the plant, a product that wouldn’t fit one of the standard shipping cartons, he’d pull together the available facts, consider the alternatives.
    Clete had stopped. When they caught up to him, he pointed. “Over there’s the Olympic-size swimming pool. If you don’t give us any trouble, you can use it once a day.”
    “Why, thank you.”
    “Dr. Brown,” Clete said. “I think you’ll find sarcasm counter-productive around here.” He turned and walked ahead of them again.
    They were a hundred yards from the entrance to the low, flat building that housed the restaurant. Henry noticed that the path leading to it was made up of small white stones that crunched under their feet. Was it that way on purpose, noisy, to betray the sound of running? Mustn’t get paranoid. When he’d seen hostages on a train on TV, he’d thought, what would he do