Cosmic Hotel (5 page)

I looked at the dark lumps of my clothes on the floor. Tomorrow morning I would be in Phoenix in
that
jacket. Then I would be in Atlanta in
that
jacket, those shoes. I heard my phone vibrate as if my
clothes knew I needed a reason to leave this room. I was getting a very panicky depression.

I got up and went through the orange light of the room and got my phone to see the text. It had originated as a *865, which meant someone from the front desk.

Van Raye was calling on the landline again. I began grabbing my pants. “Can you call Lisa?”

“Why? What are you doing?”

“I hate this, but I've got to go. I have an important phone call.”

“I think it's better if you just go,” she said, angry with me for putting a bow on this bad experience.

“Well, can you call Lisa? I can't leave you here like this.”

“I'm okay.”

I buttoned my shirt. The room smelled like our earthy alfalfa-sprout sex, and I also caught a whiff of her suitcase/home smell.

“Are you okay?” I said. I put my feet in my shoes, stuffed socks and tie into my pocket. “Look,” I said quickly, “you and Lisa are going to start a new life. Leave all the bad stuff here. Write it all down and stuff the note in the razor blade disposal in the back of the medicine cabinet. It'll go into the wall. That's what I do when I want to forget something. This hotel will be gone within a year, and all this will be gone. Call Lisa. You need Lisa.”

And I left the room.

CHAPTER 5

I took the elevator down, trotted through the quarter-staffed lobby so I wouldn't keep Van Raye waiting on the line. Why didn't he, a genius,
carry a fucking phone and call
my
cell phone? I went down the hallway of empty conference rooms. The phone was off the hook in
CUBE
1, and I yanked it up and said, “
Hello!
” I cleared my throat. There was nothing. “
Charles?
” There was only the wash of long distance and then music began—an electric guitar and Elvis's singing, “
Bright lights city
. . .”

I had time to think,
Why is he playing this?
But then I knew it wasn't Charles. Who knew that Elizabeth and I had been watching that movie? My body went weak with confusion, and the dark business center and conference room suddenly felt threatening. Did anyone see me come in here? The conference room across the glass hallway was dark and empty. I took my phone out and scrolled to see the song “Viva Las Vegas” sitting dormant on my playlist, “Songs to Beat Depression.”

“Hello?” I said, switching ears.

“ . . .
and I'm just the devil with love to spare
. . . ”

“Who is this?” I thumbed my phone to airplane mode to disconnect it from the world. Who had gotten my information? A disgruntled, newly released ex-employee of Windmere? A hacker?

I disconnected the landline by pressing the button, let it go and listened to the ancient sound of a dial tone, and put my finger on the button to disconnect, but something made me wait.

In two seconds the old phone rang beneath my finger, sending a shock through my arm, and I let it go and the line opened and the bongos and maracas and the electric guitar intro began again—“ . . .
how I wish there was more than twenty-four hours in the day
. . . ”

I swear I thought I could feel someone listening on the other end. “Hello, who is this?”

I waited an excruciating time until the song ended, but then there were clicks and the line went dead and then an annoying
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP
. The piece of paper on the pad still told me “Geneva 1000x,” and I ripped it up, threw it in the wastebasket as if it were the cause of my problems.

I waited for the phone to ring again, but it didn't as if the person on the other end knew I wasn't going to answer it this time, and I went
out into the lobby, eyed the single bellhop reading his newspaper on the podium, his hands braced on each side like a lecturer.

He straightened when he saw me coming, a night-shifter working alone whom I didn't recognize.

I said, “Did you answer that phone?”

“Yes,” he said. “For Sanghavi.”

“Who was on the other end?”

“Operator for Sanghavi.”

I turned away from the bellhop, fingering my tie and socks balled in my jacket pockets.

I considered that Van Raye was playing some kind of joke on me, which meant he was thinking about me. That made no sense. He wouldn't waste time on me.

As I waited for the elevator, the only guests in the lobby were a group of Japanese citizens holding red passports, talking to each other as they waited to check in.

I took the elevator up and carded myself into the suite. When I finally put my back against the door, I let my breath go. Elizabeth's bedroom was closed, the whole suite dead in the middle of the night, waiting for our departure. I got into my pajamas and slid into bed, staring at the empty place on the bedside table where the betta fish tank normally sat, had been for the six weeks we'd lived here, now gone. Elizabeth took care of shipping the betta fish. There had been nine or ten bettas in my life, the fish being one constant in our moving. I'd told Elizabeth I'd outgrown this tradition, but was happy to be told that she wanted to keep on doing it. Where was the betta fish tonight? In his bag of water in a Styrofoam box in the cargo bay of an airliner at fifty thousand feet? I watched the tiny green light on the fire alarm blinking on the ceiling above me, not really knowing if I ever went to sleep or not.

CHAPTER 6

Before dawn, Elizabeth and I unceremoniously walked out the front doors of the Windmere with one carry-on apiece and Elizabeth handling her violin in its black case, no one in the hotel acknowledging our departure, nor caring, and we climbed aboard a shuttle bus and rode to DFW departures where I immediately checked the news headlines on my phone again as if there would be some news of Van Raye. There wasn't.

Elizabeth had lately begun to think it was useful for business development to backtrack in our journey. If the condemned property was large enough to warrant a demolition party, she wanted to be there. So we were going to fly to Phoenix, see the final moments of the Sun Resort, meet people, and make a quick turnaround to Atlanta by tomorrow morning. That was my life.

We were x-rayed and scanned at the airport, Elizabeth making sure the blue-gloved TSA agents handled her violin properly. Each time I went through security I had to think about my cousin Durbourg who called the world beyond security “the Airport Zone,” a place he claimed was the safest place in the world.

Elizabeth and I took the tram to our concourse and rose on the escalator into the chaos of the intersection, walked together past the retail stores and the food court. When you've been up all night, the new day seems like a blurry extension of the last one.

At our gate, I plopped down in a seat and tried not to sigh and tried to look energetic. Elizabeth sat two seats down from me, piled her bag and violin in the seat between us. She knew I had stayed out all night and waited for any sign of weariness so she could pounce.

She put on reading glasses and pulled out her book. Karen Carpenter's face on the cover, that bewildered look.

“Are you enjoying Karen Carpenter's life?” I asked.

“It's a good book. Her brother was a music prodigy. She was a very hard worker.”

“She died from anorexia?”

“Yes. She started dieting at sixteen and that was the beginning of her decline. She started a diet called ‘The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet.' This was under
doctor's
supervision. Isn't that amazing? One of the main parts of the diet was drinking eight glasses of water a day. Can you imagine that? This is what doctors believed back then. What are we doing these days,
under doctor's orders
, that people in the future will think insane?”

I knew this was a mini lecture, but I relaxed just being in an airport with my mother. Honestly, I loved waiting in airports. We could do nothing but waste time. There was no business, no duties to perform, no people to meet. Whatever she was reading, when we were in the Airport Zone, it seemed interesting. I opened my eyes to listen to her.

As she talked I watched her. She was dressed in a nice pants suit, only her glasses were disturbingly cheap with gaudy, fake stones on the front, dried glue beneath the plastic gems. She didn't believe in the return value of expensive eyeglasses.

Leaning an elbow on my bag, I began re-inspecting the back of my eyelids as she told me snippets of Karen Carpenter's life, me trying not to think about Franni, the phone call, someone playing Elvis to harass me, Van Raye telling me we aren't alone in the universe—everything like a dream. I had gone through all my secure websites and changed the password I'd had forever (“bettafish14”) to a new password, “geneva1000x.” After you change your old password, you feel like you've left an old life behind.

I interrupted Elizabeth, “Where's Randolph been?”

She searched her mind, and I saw her memory catch but she cracked no emotion and played dumb. Did her face really blush? “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

When I was a kid, she would turn into “Randolph” when we got bored waiting in airports or waiting for meetings when no one else was around. When this possession took over her body, she changed her voice to this kind of fay Transylvanian accent and claimed he, this person
Randolph, had possessed her, checking our world out. It was so unlike her to do Randolph; I couldn't even imagine her doing it back then, certainly couldn't imagine her doing it now, but I wanted some acknowledgment that this had been part of our lives. It was Elizabeth's magic.

Randolph always acted surprised to find himself in Elizabeth's body, announcing, “Randolph is here! Randolph, never Randy!” coming to her when we were on the concourse level of terminal 4 at JFK. He would say, “This is one of those ports for aircraft! Which one is this?” It was a good performance. I could barely see hints of Elizabeth's personality coming through, the dry analysis of things around her, filtered through the mind of someone supposedly not from this world. After quizzing me about Earth, about America and this world, never a word about hotels, Randolph would announce his departure, “Until next time, Number 1.” (He called me, for no known reason, “Number 1.”) When he left, Elizabeth's face would change back to normal, staring at the familiar airport, and I would say, “Elizabeth?” and she would always respond in her own voice restored, “What? What's the matter with you?”

There had been a period of time when I'd begged Elizabeth to fess up that she was Randolph, but she never broke or gave the act up, Randolph coming into her body when I least expected. When she was bored with driving the rental car through the desert, she would suddenly announce in the accent, “
What is this I'm doing?
” staring at the steering wheel. “
What is this machine called?
” I remember her being startled once when I asked, “If you die, would Randolph die too?” She simply said, “I'm not going to die.”

I don't remember when she stopped doing Randolph, but it was a part of my childhood that had been helpful, used, and then put down.

“Come on,” I said to her now in DFW, “Randolph one more time. You know, I want to hear the voice.”

“You're almost thirty years old,” she said. I could tell she was mulling it over. Randolph never made requested appearances. Had Elizabeth become even more serious over the years, lost the ability to be Randolph?

“Aren't you over that?” she said.

“No.”

“Anyway, I certainly don't know what you are talking about,” she said.

I could see a hint of a smile, but she kept reading without that index finger scanning each line in Karen Carpenter's life.

Finally the counter agent called over the speaker, “Passengers Sandeep and Elizabeth Sanghavi please see an airline representative,” probably thinking we were some married couple. People either thought it was weird or noble that I'd traveled my whole life with my mother. To me, it was just us.

“Marvelous,” Elizabeth said, standing at the announcement. She marched up to the counter, still wearing her cheap glasses, and got our upgrades.

She came back and gave both boarding passes to me. “This isn't an overindulgence,” she said. I had heard the upgrade lecture before because she was on constant watch for overindulgence, which, according to her, this country was full of.

“It's not free, we earned it,” she said. “The service in business class is the same as coach was twenty years ago. Now, let's walk to some retail stores.”

I sighed. “Can't we just wait here?”

“No,” she said, “walking around will keep you awake.”

“Why do I have to stay awake?”

“It's daytime,” she said.

I knew she was going to go into Hammell Brothers Clothiers to take pictures of the inventory like she always did, exclaiming how many choices there were and how full the inventories were. “What kind of country is this?” she would declare.

I told her no, I was staying right here. I couldn't take another speech on the economy and trends, and us looking like we were just off the plane and had never seen Hammell Brothers before.

She took her digital camera out and left her bag and violin with me, and she walked toward the intersection of our concourse.

I leaned my elbow on my bag, closed my eyes, and began concentrating on listening to the sounds of an airport, making my body, mostly my hands and mind, be still. A man's voice raised to cellphone level said, “I got no friendly face, I got no yuck-yuck-yuck,” and then the Doppler shift of his voice as he went away, and his conversation merged into other spoken words and sentences until all conversations blended into babble that sounds the same no matter where you are in the world—a hotel in Chicago, the lobby of a busy theatre in Paris. This reminded me of what Van Raye had said—“It's like a bunch of patterns of communications unintentionally radiating into space.” He'd called it “the Big Murmur.”

I opened my eyes. A pilot stood in front of me with one of those black bags pilots roll along like obedient dogs, the kind with the stickers of all the aircraft they'd flown.

Maybe I had fallen asleep, but now I let my eyes make the roam of the vigilant traveler, a subconscious inventory of things: our two bags, boarding passes, and a mental alarm went off. Where was Elizabeth's violin case? I looked behind my seat and saw only an ugly magazine subscription card on the floor. The nearest person was a woman feeding her baby. I walked toward her, looking under seats as I went. I carried our shoulder bags, glanced behind a trash can.

The mother tore bread apart and fed the little girl who sat with her hands wide on the seat handles.

“Pardon me,” I said, “but I had a violin, in a case,” I pointed to where I had been sitting. “It's missing.”

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “I can't help you.”

Obviously she thought I was a crazy person or running some kind of scam, although people are usually slightly less suspicious of each other in the Airport Zone.

“It is a violin, my mother's,” I said to the woman feeding her girl, choosing the right word—
mother
—to suggest I was okay. “You didn't see anyone walking away with it?”

“Oh boy, no,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn't really paying attention.” The little girl held her mouth open. Her mom turned her head to see the people walking by.

“Shit,” I whispered and then saw Elizabeth coming down the concourse. Had she taken the violin to teach me a lesson? It was amazing to watch people steer out of her way as if she were a ship. I looked at her hands. There was nothing but her camera looped to her wrist.

I took steps to meet her, held up my arms.

“What's the matter?” she said, glancing at the bags hanging from my shoulder. “Where is my violin?”

“I can't find it.”

“What?”

“It was right here. I was sitting right there.” I pointed to the seats beneath a you-are-here map.

“Please don't tell me this.”

“It's got to be here somewhere,” I said.

We walked around. She leaned over and looked between the rows of seats.

“You fell asleep?” she asked me.

“No! I closed my eyes for a second.”

I followed her as she searched the gate area.

“You were supposed to look after my things,” she said. “That was all you had to do. Now what has happened?”

People in the gate area began to eye us suspiciously and slowly their legs and hands began guarding their own bags as if to say,
see, this is how you do it
, and the small U handles on their suitcases seemed to be mocking smiles.

I stopped. “We are going to have to report this,” I said. We searched the next gate area until they announced the boarding of our flight.

We reported it to the counter person, Elizabeth demanding to speak with the head of security as if this were a hotel. A regular airport police
officer came and took the report, telling us that they rarely had problems with theft inside the airport.

Elizabeth said, “That doesn't help us.”

She and I were the last to board, Elizabeth holding the yellow police report in her hand.

When we found our seats in the middle of the business cabin, there was already a briefcase in the overhead and a jacket folded on top. To a man reading his
Wall Street Journal
, Elizabeth said, pointing to his bag and jacket, “Is this yours?”

When he saw her, he got up and took his bag and coat down and tried to smile at her, placed his things under the seat in front of him.

Elizabeth snapped the “Missing or Stolen Property Report” for me to take.

On regular days, she always sat in the aisle seat. Today she slid in and faced the window and didn't speak the whole way to Phoenix, the bright new sunlight slowly moving around the cabin in the exact shape of the portholes as the plane banked. I kept going over the contact numbers in fine print on the bottom of the report and her scrawled signature, the description of the missing item, “violin and case, Master Stefen.” The estimated value of the violin was an astounding $45,000 and next to
ITEM INSURED
there was a big check by
NO
. Under the column
PURCHASE DATE
, she had written a date that I calculated was when she was ten years old, four years after she'd come to the US, back when her family owned hotels, fifteen years before her father died of a heart attack, followed only six months later by her mother's death.