Cosmic Hotel (27 page)

This is the hatred I feel
, I thought while standing on the pool deck.
I dislike him so because he
affected
our lives.

I leaned on the shovel, looking at the hollowness of a shadow by the blooming azalea bush, the shadow that was this Butch who'd gone through nearly his whole life with Randolph inside him.

My phone vibrated, and a text from Dubourg was bright in my face:

I thumbed it off. Yes, I remembered the plan. We were sending Randolph to Chava Norma. I looked at the faint star in the sky and remembered the plan hatched to keep Van Raye calm; a plan us four coconspirators had forged in what seemed like a dream.

The dark, flat shape of Van Raye was sunk in the lounge chair and he didn't know how close the star really was to moving into the field of view.

Ursula snapped another pretzel stick and I cringed. I was on the verge of yelling at her,
STOP! I hate the fucking snapping
, and then Dubourg's teeth broke an antacid.

Ursula came to the fence to see my face. “Why are you standing here?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I like the view to the west there. I'm just saying . . . ”
I'm just saying
was a statement that Elizabeth loathed. “Empty talk,” she would tell me, and I felt sadness coming on.

I said to Ursula, just because I could, “I'm
just
saying! Why don't we get married?”

“Don't start on this again,” she whispered.

“He's lapsing,” Dubourg said.

“I'm not,” I said.

From the pool, Ruth said, “Short-term memory is a strange beast. It has to take its natural course.”

Van Raye's snoring stopped. I know how he felt when he woke among the others, felt us watching him.

“I'm not a goddamn patient,” I said to Ruth. “I'm right here.”

“And you're displaying unusual anger,” Ruth said. “Very common with head trauma.”

“It was a
concussion
,” I said, “days ago.”

“Weeks ago,” Dubourg said.

“That's what I meant.”

That was when I heard another clicking, felt it rise through my legs, making me cringe because it was another snapping, but this was the pool light's timer, the underwater light spreading down the length of the pool, Ruth's body dark and surrounded by sparkling, floating microparticles, her belly flashing white like a keel beneath her.

Ursula was on the steps, hair slicked back over her head, freckles on her shoulders, one bra cup gapping so that I could see the crescent of
her burgundy nipple.
Happiness, sit. Happiness, stay.
But her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, and her face lax with worry and unable to break the trance of staring into the palm trees where the light from the pool wiggled. Dubourg was reclined in the deck chair, his legs astraddle and his valise beside him.

Charles's new eyeglasses mirrored the light, dull stipples going across his body. He was pale, his boxer shorts dry, left foot hanging over the side, and his right leg only a stump with a rubber swim cap on the end.
He has a stump!
It was true: his leg was gone. These forgotten facts of my past rebounded into place. His temporary prosthesis stood upright on the ground beside his lounge chair.

“Charles lost his leg,” I mumbled, and I couldn't help myself, I smiled. That was all—
Charles lost a leg
, which seemed much less than the lurking sadness that had been in my brain. I said “
AAK
,
AAK, AAK
,” and everyone looked at me.

“Not this again,” Dubourg said.

“Why am I thinking AAK? Laughing?” I asked.

“‘
A
mputation
a
bove the
k
nee,'” Dubourg said.

That is why I am angry. If it weren't for Randolph, Van Raye would have his leg!

“Are you okay?” Ursula asked me.

“Sure.”

Charles put his hand on his bare thigh. His remaining foot was bare, toes flexing, and the stump had a white rubber swim cap on its end, a child's swim cap with black rubber flowers on it. I remembered he'd found it in the pool box. His crutches were on the ground beside him. I also now remembered he wanted to take Randolph out and present him to the world and be really famous. Frankenstein and his creature. I remembered a scene from yesterday, or maybe it was the day before. Butch went missing, and I had found him in the empty underground parking garage standing obediently in his chariot beside Charles's Jaguar. His leash coiled beneath the seam of the car's back door, and there Charles sat in the backseat. Charles didn't move even
when I peered through the window, him frozen in a painkiller haze, desiring to steal the dog. I looked in the car and saw the other end of the leash still looped to his hand. I got in on the other side, moved his crutches to sit, and he'd explained to me that he was running away with the dog but couldn't manage to lift him into the Jaguar. On the dashboard of his car was this ugly statue of the alien Buddha. This was the first time I'd ever seen the thing, the long eyes of a classic Gray but plump and fat as Buddha. I remembered the way the statue seemed to be staring and smiling at how ridiculous we were in the backseat of the car as if waiting for a chauffeur who would never show.

In the lounge chair beside the pool, Van Raye grabbed his thigh and shouted, “Why won't it go away?” He held his palms up to heaven and made fists, “I can feel the wind tickling the hairs! The ultimate irony, people:
It hurts like hell and it's not even there! My toes are curling painfully! For fuck sake, these painkillers are worthless.
” He sat up and raised the stump, tore the swim cap off the end, revealing the puckered brown end. He threw the cap in the pool.

The metal shaft of the “shin” of Van Raye's prosthesis stuck out of the boot on the ground, brushed aluminum that matched his new aluminum-framed glasses.

Ruth didn't break her swimming stroke, capturing the swim cap in her hand. She went to the edge of the pool and looked at Charles. She put her arms on the side of the pool and said in a whisper, “One of you, please be his leg. Dubourg?”

Dubourg didn't respond immediately, but reluctantly rose and went over to Van Raye. He stared down at our father who had his eyes closed, Charles's chest rising and falling. Dubourg lay flat on the ground beside the chair and scooted beneath Van Raye's lounge, Dubourg in only boxer shorts. He turned his hips sideways so that he could stick his foot between the plastic straps of the lounge in front of Van Raye's stump, holding his head off the concrete to see what he was doing.

Van Raye stirred but didn't open his eyes. Dubourg's leg was positioned on the lounge as though it were Charles's leg, left leg in the place
of Van Raye's missing right leg. Dubourg, half beneath the lounge, fiddled with his phone, holding it above his head to type. His text came into me.

We knew that if Van Raye knew it was tomorrow, he might sober up and cause trouble. I think Charles fantasized about being in a crowded grand lecture hall. I imagined the alien in a glass beaker, the substance inside glowing magnificent blue. He would be
famous
famous and the audience would clap for him and his “alien.” Monster movies rarely ended well for the monster. Randolph wasn't light, he was data; he was sentient, a living being on the microchip inside the dog. “Aren't we all data?” Ruth had said when she'd made this discovery that day in the attic.

The submarine light in the pool casted a V through the particles, and the surface settled around Ruth as she braced on the pool's edge watching Dubourg beneath Van Raye. She put the swim cap on her own head, pushed her hair, now grown several inches, beneath it. Dubourg still lay on his back halfway beneath Charles, fingers interlocked on his stomach holding his phone, staring at the sky, the brighter stars that could shine through to the dome of the airport.

I spoke quietly to Dubourg, “You don't believe it's God, do you?”

“No,” he whispered.

When Van Raye's eyes opened, I said to him, “Are you angry with her?”

“Who?” he said.

“Elizabeth,” I said.

“My God, you're breaking my heart, Sandeep, simply breaking my heart.” Dubourg raised his leg, which simulated hyperextension of Van Raye's “leg.” “How could I ever be angry at your mother?” Charles said, finally seeing his “leg.”

Why couldn't he understand that the big toe was on the wrong side?

“How's your leg?” Ruth asked him.

“I can feel the nice temperature of the night against it,” he said again, keeping his head still, moving only his eyes to the leg. “My toes have uncurled, mercifully.”

“And the pain?” Ruth asked.

“Much, much better,” he slurred.

“Wiggle your toes,” Ruth whispered to him.

Dubourg wiggled his toes, and Van Raye watched the toes wiggle, eyes in the bottom of their sockets like he was seeing a monster awakening and a wicked smile appeared on his face and he closed his eyes again.

“Are they wiggling?” Ruth asked.

“Yes, wonderfully so,” he said. Then he whispered, “Thanks, Dubourg.”

She pushed gently away from the wall, still wearing the swim cap, which accentuated her beautiful face. Van Raye drifted into la-la land. I wondered:
In the book he will write about all this, will he refer to me as Sandeep or Sandy?

The dog seemed to be sleeping, bowed down on his front legs, butt in the air. I pushed his fur back on his face. His eyes were closed, but his chest moved. Was this all there was to being alive? I tried to imagine that Being was inside Butch, a being with language and all of the knowledge that he had gained traveling through the galaxy. I asked Ruth, “Are you sure we should send him on? I mean, it's a matter of waiting. He'll still be able to go eventually.”

“It's been decided,” Dubourg said. “He wants to leave.”

“Yes,” Ursula said. “He's got a right to go.”

I looked at my phone and saw the clock had ticked past eleven.

I didn't hide the swiftness. I went to the fence, climbed up on the concrete skirting with my bare feet. Through the fence, down the hill was Gypsy Sky Cargo Center where the dozens of jets were lined perfectly under the bright fake daylight of the never-sleeping Gypsy Sky Cargo. Some jets had cargo-bay doors closed, were warming up, engines going, red lights blinking. From this distance, I couldn't tell which people had dark skin and which had light skin, but I knew Elizabeth wore the earphones that went around her neck, not over her head. Only supervisors wore that kind.

Ursula stepped up on the concrete skirt with me. I looked at her and smiled, but she didn't smile. She looked at my right eye, then back at my left as if trying to find something. I leaned and sucked on the tip of her bare shoulder, tasted the chlorine and her salt. I wanted to trace the perfect line of her neck with my finger and into the cleavage and that one spot in the center of her that I loved. “I'm hearing Sanctus bells,” I said to her but she turned to search Gypsy Sky.

“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

“No. What are you looking at?”

I straddled the corner, feet hurting, hands clinging to the wire mesh. “Down there,” I said and pointed to where people conversed in groups, debriefing and briefing. Over the acres of black tarmac, mirages of heat wobbled upward as if the Gypsy Sky Cargo Corporation were casting spells on the sky. Someone could ship the most insignificant package to the smallest village in the world and do it overnight. I could hear Elizabeth in my mind saying, “What kind of world do we live in?” Now she was part of it, shipping those boxes.

Then I realized I'd been staring right at Elizabeth over there. I recognized her head held straight, her crisp movement, her long hair in a ponytail down the back of her yellow reflective vest. She pointed to a cart of cargo and gave people instructions, took an electronic pad from a man. I waved overhead to get her attention, and she saw me, put the clipboard over her eyes to block out the light. She raised her gloved hand and waved.

“That's her?” Ursula asked.

“Yes.” I gave a hearty overhand salute.

Ursula didn't wave. It was too late anyway because Elizabeth had turned to get on a tractor to go give other people instructions on what to do.

Ursula dropped from the fence. I heard her feet hitting the ground hard, reminding me of childhood in Sopchoppy, her dropping from a tree.

“I'll carry him up,” Ursula said and the unhappiness of Butch's short life with us came upon me.

Butch's head was down in the grass, one front paw bent as he slept. I texted to Randolph:

I could feel the others watching me. My heart pounded. We'd decided to let Butch go and the sadness flooded in.