Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  Now she let go of me in the elevator and leaned back against the wall with her hips thrust and looked at the coaster. I saw her light on her phone glowing through the material of her pants and that just made me crazier about her, and I tried to put everything else out of my mind and think: Sex, we are going to open the door in our lives and let each other into the secret room. My father thinks he’s found out we are not alone in the universe, but I am stepping into a hotel room seven stories above Dallas, Texas, with a woman from South Carolina, her phone lighting up through the material of her pants.

  I stood on the threshold of her room as though I didn’t know my way around a queen single and watched her switch the desk lamp on low.

  I let the door go. Like any good hotel, at the Windmere there was a nice consistency to the way a clean room smelled.

  Franni balanced with one hand on my shoulder to push off her shoes, and she kissed me, and I tasted a grain of sugar from her cranberry martini. I sat down on the bed and pulled her between my legs and wrapped my arms around her body and kissed her neck. She climbed and straddled me, the wind chimes of erection playing in the pleasure centers of my brain.

  She said, “I’ll be right back,” and went into the bathroom.

  I got up and took off my coat. There is something contrarily pleasant about having an erection in pleated pants. I hung my jacket on the back of the chair and glanced at the bathroom door, then held my tie so I could bow my nose into the concentrated scent of her suitcase. There was a feminine flowery smell, and a new Band-Aidy smell inside her suitcase, which was a Charleston or Mount Pleasant bedroom. I’d never been in a woman’s real bedroom before, but I’d smelled hundreds of women’s bedrooms inside suitcases. Franni’s life was in there: the beach where she’d invented the game “Fake or Real?” years ago before she and her friend thought they’d be on this trip to have their own breasts enhanced, and surely there was the bad husband’s smell inside there too. The ordinary suitcase and its smell of a home gave me the same feeling I got when our plane was on final approach to yet another airport, and out the window I saw the ordinary neighborhoods with their swirling branches of streets, and the drooping blossoms of cul-de-sacs, the houses collected in curves like seeds in a pomegranate. I had lived my whole life in hotel rooms, wanted to live no other way, a life which made me immune to being homesick except for my aunts’ and uncles’ houses down in Sopchoppy I used to visit every summer when I was a kid.

  When the bathroom door clicked open, I snapped out of my trance and found myself sitting on the bed with my fingers still on the knot of my tie. Franni stood before me in panties and a light-colored camisole, her nipples denting the silk fabric, and her perfect shape—breasts, legs, the slight, beautifully feminine paunch of her stomach and hips as she walked and turned out the desk lamp, leaving us in the light filtered through the shears of the orange parking lot below. She searched my face for a second in the dark, and we were kissing again and she was working my tie loose. I took over and she unbuckled my belt and popped me out of my boxers and rubbed me with her fingers.

  We got on the bed, me on top, and I tried to lift off her camisole, but she stopped me, instead rolling out from under me and taking off just her panties, and in a flick of a leg she sent them flying, and she rolled on top of me, still wearing the silver silk camisole.

  I felt beneath the camisole for her spine and the fine muscles there, and she made a little sound as she pressed herself on me. I tried once again to remove the camisole but she squeezed her arms and worked her hips harder, losing herself for a moment, and the strap of the camisole slipped off her shoulder and one breast flopped out with the dark nipple and she put her head beside mine and I could feel her eyelashes on my ear, and what I saw in my mind was the betta fish that had lived in the little aquarium on my bedside table whatever hotel I was in, rising and falling with his nose in the corner of the glass, those fine fins fluttering like eyelashes, and that made me think about my cousin Ursula letting me give her “butterfly kisses” when we were kids, and there with Franni on top of me, and in about thirty seconds I came. I tried to keep going for her sake, but the juices and my semi-flaccidness was making it impossible.

  She pushed up and put the strap back on her shoulder and rolled off me. We lay beside each other, staring at the ceiling, and I realized I was in one of those moods where the idea of doing something was always better than actually doing it. I was thinking we’d just had the worst sex these walls had probably ever seen, then wondering what had happened in this room in the last forty years of its existence. What was the best sex these walls had ever seen? What loves had been made? What fights and heartbreaks had soaked into the walls? What bad deals had been hatched? Who was the richest person who’d slept here? Who was the poorest person? The most famous? What salesmen missed his family and sat against this headboard and watched TV? For a brief second I could hear the sound of his dry feet rubbing together at the end of the bed. People had laid over here, slept here, fucked who they were supposed to fuck and people they weren’t suppose to fuck, masturbated in front of the mirror, and someone missed their flight, people shot heroine, some danced to their own hummed music, washed the travel day off their bodies, a man got on his knees beside this bed and prayed to Jesus, someone tossed pills into their mouth, picked at a hernia scar, puked in the toilet, and another person kept dialing the same number over and over, waiting for the voicemail not to pick up. There had been people inside here who had wished for their regular lives back and people who wished never to have to leave this hotel room, and there was a woman who stopped here and had sex on her way to get her tits done, trying for a new start on her life, and all these people were on their way somewhere.

  “Do you hear that?” I whispered.

  She wasn’t breathing hard but she held her breath anyway.

  “A hotel feels different with a lot of people in it,” I said. “When the occupancy was low a few weeks ago, it sounded different. Now there’s this hum to the walls.”

  I didn’t expect her to understand or care, but what I really didn’t expect was to hear her sniff, not like a regular sniff, but one that made me understand she was crying, and a little choke came from inside her.

  “Are you okay?”

  She swiped tears with her fingertips and pretended to gain composure.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, which I meant about me and the sex, but also about the cheating man and her old life.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I just don’t think I’ll ever be happy again.” Her voice seemed too loud because these were our first normal sounds after we’d made love.

  “You will,” I said trying to whisper. “This wasn’t very good.” I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t know how she liked to be held.

  “Is it terrible,” she said, “that I believe that I was always happier in the past than I am now?”

  This made me think about the pad beside the telephone when I was talking to Van Raye—“Geneva 1000x”—we were a thousand times happier in Geneva than now.

  “Sometimes I think everyone feels like that,” I said. “If there’s anyone who understands, it’s me. Listen, you can’t let yourself get like this. Emotional pain affects you on a cellular level. You think you won’t be happy again, but you will. You and Lisa, you’re going to a resort.”

  She twisted her body and arched on her shoulders and took the camisole off and threw it. It flew across the room and she kept her arms spread, one over my chest. She looked down at herself in the dim light. Her nipples were in the middle of the little triangles of untanned skin. She took her hands and pushed her breasts together. She let them drop. “Real,” she said with them flattened by gravity, then she pushed them together, “Fake.” She let them go, held them together, saying over and over, “Real . . . fake . . . real.” She quickly pinched her nipples as if to punish herself. “You can always remember some time in the past when you were happier than you are now.”

  “Do you want some water?” I aske
d her. “Or something from the minibar, or do you have anything in particular you take when you feel like this?”

  “You are so weird,” she said.

  She only took a deep breath, and I waited for it to be released, but it came in a whispered, “Tell me how you did it.”

  There was the tick of the heater coming on and air blowing through the vent, and I knew what she meant—the coaster trick.

  “It’s magic,” I said.

  “Right. Right. It could be. You could be one of those Eastern mystics,” she said. “There was a boy who sat under that banyan tree for like a year in India and didn’t move, meditating, and never ate. It’s true. I read about it.”

  Someone in the room above us dropped something on the tile floor of their bathroom, a sound that came into the temporary life of Franni and Sandeep and then went.

  “But that’s bullshit,” Franni said. She pulled her knee up beneath the covers and slammed it back down. “You want me to believe it’s real magic?” she asked.

  “Just believe what you want.”

  “Just tell me how you did it,” she said.

  I remembered one part of her story, that she had been the last person in Charleston or Mount Pleasant to know her husband was having an affair. Everyone knew but her. I remembered a chapter in Van Raye’s My Year of Quantum Weirdness about the steps he’d gone through when he’d been let inside the secret Borealis Project for the Department of Energy. Step 1 was disbelief—this isn’t real. One of the other steps was that you felt like a fool for not knowing what had been going on all along, and what everyone else knew.

  I began explaining the trick. “It’s really a variation of a famous card trick, ‘The Ambitious Card,’” I said. “Seemingly supercilious motions are usually the most important,” and I explained, and in doing so, even to me, it seemed simple and only depended on knowing how to double-card coasters.

  After the explanation, there was silence in the room except for the humming of human occupancy around us, and as she was thinking about the trick, I said, “How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and found out there was life on another planet?”

  She began crying again. “It would be horrible!” she said. She picked up the sheet and wiped her face. “I remember being twenty-one . . .” she said.

  “I’m not twenty-one,” I said because I know I looked young.

  She paid no attention to my comment and said, “And I remember thinking anything was possible. I always thought I would work in New York. When I was your age, I wondered, ‘What is Paris like?’ but then I had this feeling that one day I would go to Paris or even to the moon—shit, that wasn’t beyond the possibility—and I was happy. You know when you were little, someone mentions the moon, and you can say to yourself, ‘I’ll probably go to the moon one day’ . . .” She started to cry and her voice got higher, and she said, “I’m in Dallas! I’m certainly never going to the moon. Why is that so depressing?”

  “You can still go to Paris,” I said.

  “I’ve been to Paris!” she said. “That’s not the point. You just keep moving to a state of unhappiness. I mean it’s a scientific fact, I mean they’ve done studies, the older you get, when you take LSD, the more bad trips you have.” I tried to follow her. “Because your general outlook becomes bleaker,” she said. “When you’re young, you have more good trips because you still have time, and more time makes you more optimistic about everything.”

  This was the worst conversation I had ever had, the walls absorbing our bad experience with forty-plus years of experiences, which dawned on me as a stupid theory, as if you could play the room back like a phonograph, the needle playing in the grooves left by the impressions of all the lives.

  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.

  call on business center phone. Long distance. Can’t transfer. Do you want?

  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 pocke
ts.

  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.