Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  I started to tell her that if you ever defend what you are wearing with “it’s comfortable,” then you are wearing the wrong thing, but I stopped myself. “How did you even get up here?”

  “I told security I was with y’all,” she said. “The uniform helps,” she fiddled with her tie clip, the black zeppelin on it. “And my charm,” she said.

  “Dubourg knew you were going to be here, didn’t he?”

  “I guess. He thinks I’ve flipped out or something. I’m trying to keep away from the network. They want the follow-up interviews, you know. I don’t want to do them.”

  She’d gained some weight, but she still had the Dunbar good looks. It was hard to believe the two of us shared a common great-grandfather and great-grandmother. Over by the banquet table I saw her suitcase standing straight up, her coat and captain’s cap resting on the extended handle like an empty scarecrow, her pilot self. “Your mother hates me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you,” I said. “It’s actually quite the opposite. But she thinks I’ll end up in some pub with you or sprawled on the hood of your rental car at the end of the runway watching the belly of jets.”

  “HA! And you had fun.”

  “Yeah, and I’m glad you’re here, but I really have to work, and I can’t upset her anymore. You have to give me a heads-up when you are going to show up.”

  “And miss that priceless face you made?” She raised her eyebrows. “And if I’d called you, you would have told me some bullshit about working and blown me off.” She put a hand on the red railing that went all the way around the roof of this new hotel. “Don’t resist, you know you’re going to ditch this . . .” Ursula’s glasses reflected the sky.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m on probation and walking a thin line already, trust me.”

  This hotel we were on, the New Sun Hotel, was perfect, even the painted concrete of this deck was spotless, and the rails glistened with red glossy paint that still looked wet.

  “There’s a lot going on,” I said. “I lost her violin.”

  “Her violin?” She turned up the last sip from her cup, tapping the bottom with a finger.

  “Yes, her violin. I lost it in Dallas. Do you have any connections at DFW?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Doesn’t she have another one?”

  “No,” I said, “this was her violin since she was a kid.”

  “Elizabeth was once a child?” Ursula said. “I thought she came into the world exactly like that.” She pointed to Elizabeth talking in a group.

  “I should go mingle,” I said but didn’t move, and she said nothing because she knew I wasn’t going to move. I felt the wonderful shape of a triangle diazepam pill in the secret corner of my pocket. I slipped it in my mouth and when Ursula saw me, she said, “I just noticed . . . you’re a wreck.” She pushed her glasses up on her forehead where they stuck. “What’s the matter with you?” I could see in her brown eyes the specks of black decorating her irises.

  “I lost her violin!”

  “Oh,” she said. “Buy another one. What’s the problem?” She wiggled her watch to see the time. “Du is in Seattle by now.”

  “He told me you were in Salt Lake City.”

  “He told me to come see you. I can get anywhere on a moment’s notice, remember. Call and I’ll be there. God, why can’t the three of us have more junctions?”

  “Junctions?”

  “Conjunctions or something, what word am I looking for?”

  Dubourg and Ursula lived across from each other their whole lives on the misnamed Harms Road in Wakulla County, Florida, along with all my tanned, brown-kneed cousins: Holly, Marissa, Jenna, Good John, and Bad John, their houses scattered not more than a short ATV ride away. If someone had asked them, Ursula and Dubourg would say they were first cousins, which was true if Dubourg’s adoption to the Dunbar side of the family trumped the fact that he was Charles’s biological son by another woman who gave him up for adoption to Van Raye’s first cousin, Louis and his wife Lucy. It’s complicated, but if you do the math—divide by pi, carry the remainder, multiply by an estranged father—Dubourg and I know we are half brothers and sons of Van Raye but call each other cousin, and the skin on my knees was pale and the skin on his knees was brown, a peculiar trait of my Sopchoppy cousins I silently studied but could not explain as simple wrinkles or old scars or just the shadow of predominate patella bones. No one seemed wise to their brown knees but me.

  Ursula glanced across the party to Elizabeth talking to Susanne Lund who was the banker who worked at least half the properties we dealt with. They saw me, and Susanne waved.

  “Are you glad to see me or not?” Ursula said.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Ann-Margret?”

  She wrinkled her nose like something stank and her sunglasses returned to her nose, and she became more interested in the wind and the gutted hotel in the distance. “I used to get it in college some. Stop looking at me. You’ve seen me all your life.”

  I said, “We just watched Viva Las Vegas last night. Ann-Margret is on my mind.”

  She pushed the glasses up on her nose with a knuckle. “Lay off it, okay? I don’t like it.”

  Around our rooftop party, white tulips drooped over their vases, and I forced myself out of the cousin bubble, and it felt horrible outside it. I felt invulnerable when I was around my cousins.

  “I’m really very glad to see you, but I’m on the job.”

  “Job, please.” She crushed the cup with one hand, but it was one of those brittle plastic cups whose sides split but popped back into a destroyed shape of itself, and she considered its defiance. “I need to tell you something,” she said, “but not here, okay?”

  Please God, I thought, don’t tell me you are getting married. I wanted badly to tell her what Van Raye had claimed. “I got something I want to tell you too,” I said. “What do you want to tell me?”

  “Did I just fucking say not here?” she said.

  “Okay, okay. Give me a second, okay?” I stepped away and found the number to DFW’s lost and found and called, and they passed me off through several numerical choices.

  I watched a middle-aged woman in a beautiful blue dress approach Ursula with a pen and a pad ready. Please, I didn’t want to go to a wedding. She had been dating a guy from Charlotte but that hadn’t been that long, had it? Why wouldn’t I want her to get married? Probably the same reason I didn’t want Dubourg go be a priest. I would lose them.

  Ursula didn’t have the normal light complexion of a redhead. I guess it was all those years in the Wakulla sun, but she looked like an airline pilot, straight, true, and smart. She had wanted to be a pilot since she was a little girl, nothing else. I think those looks and earnestness were why the network and the airline had chosen her for the reality show about the crazy cross-country flight, Flight 000.

  Regular people auditioned to be passengers aboard Flight 000 from Los Angeles to New York, and the airline cooperating with the network was the unknown Shenandoah Airlines. It was promoted as a “test flight” with four crewmembers (pilot, copilot, two flight attendants) and twenty passengers. When the network and the airline chose the “volunteers,” they signed a waiver and a confidential agreement that the company could do basically anything to the aircraft and the occupants during the flight. This was the catch: The passengers and crew could never tell anyone what had happened on Flight 000.

  The only known flight plan was that the plane would be out of contact with the ground except for normal flight communications, but there were to be no cell phones, no cameras, no recording devices. When the flight was completed, by agreement, the passengers and crew would be given physical exams, would be debriefed and released, and no one could reveal what had happened during the trip. In return, the passengers and the four flight crewmembers, including Ursula (pilot in command), were given guaranteed lifetime gate passes to fly. Any of the Flight 000-ers could walk up to Shenandoah or one of its affiliated airlines, show her ID, and
the airline would immediately issue a first-class ticket, bump a passenger if necessary. It was a deal that even airline employees didn’t enjoy, guaranteed flight, no reservation, no pre-notification. The only catch was that if one person broke the confidentiality agreement, then everyone—passengers and the four crewmembers—lost their lifetime passes.

  When Ursula called and told me that she was one of the chosen cast members, the pilot in command, Elizabeth and I had to watch. Twenty ordinary Americans had been chosen, the passengers interviewed on morning talk shows before the flight. “What possibility most frightens you?” “What is more important, the fame or the lifetime pass?” “What is your worst fear?” “Do you get motion sickness easily?”

  One news personality pointed out that Flight 000 might do aerobatics, and then an aviation expert was brought on-air and the aerobatic possibilities of the 737 were plotted along with possible airframe stresses (barrel roll was the most realistic). What about depressurization, a nosedive and pulling up at the last second?

  A passenger, an elementary school teacher from Duluth, Georgia, said that she had nightmares that they were going to pipe “strong odors” through the ventilation just to see how passengers would react to five hours of torture. Others speculated on a simulated hijacking. Torture was a big part of the forecasts. What was the airline testing?

  Shenandoah said that the captain and copilot would have the same information as the passengers. Ursula was selected because of her experience in the 737 and because you looked at Ursula in her uniform and immediately wanted to know everything about her, including if she was married. At first she told me she was doing it for the small bundle of money the network was paying the flight crew as well as the lifetime pass, but then on a late-night phone call before Flight 000, she told me that the real reason she was doing it was that she would die if she didn’t know what had happened on the flight. “I have to know, Sandy. I couldn’t stand around and see these people who knew and I didn’t. I have to know what happened. I have dreams at night that the flight takes off without me and I’ll never know.”

  “But you’ll tell me, right?”

  “Fuck off.”

  Elizabeth watched a few episodes of Flight 000, and she told me that this program proved that the world was so big they could find crazy people to do anything. Her opinion of the publicity for the airlines was right on: “The strange thing is that you wouldn’t think people want mystery and quirkiness with an airline, but there’s something about it that will work. Trust me. The world goes through periods of reverse in logic. The world is crazy.”

  Ursula didn’t sleep for days before the flight, going over every emergency procedure, stealing time on the ground school’s 737 simulator (she called it “the stimulator”).

  On a national network, the world watched as Flight 000 taxied into position for takeoff at LAX, the spotlights shining on the fuselage and the giant black letters painted on the aluminum body: FLIGHT 000. It gained speed and lifted off, wheels up, and disappeared into the night just like any other jet. Viewers could go to the network’s website and track the aircraft across the country, but that was all we got: the icon of a 737 as big as the state of Delaware flying a curving path across the country.

  The kicker was that Ursula made a smooth Kennedy Airport landing at dawn, and the media immediately approached passengers trying to find any clues to what had happened. Passengers looked sleepy but normal, deboarding and waving to the cameras and the crowd, most smiling and shaking their heads, some ducking and avoiding, some giving interviews that said nothing, but there was no comment from anyone about what had occurred during the flight.

  Elizabeth predicted the network never expected them to remain silent. The big story was what happened to the people after the flight.

  The network had regular updates with Flight 000 participants, showed them walking up to the airline counter and getting issued their ticket, smiling and waving as they disappeared, five minutes later, into the security line, and if the question was sneaked into the conversation, the standard response: “I have a lifetime pass to the world. Everyone depends on me, and I depend on everyone else. I will not comment.”

  Amazingly, it took six days for the first person to break from that pat answer. This man was clearly frazzled and was being interviewed in a booth at a bar, a sales representative from Pittsburgh, and he deviated by saying this simple statement: “Maybe nothing at all happened. Maybe everything was normal.” Then more passengers began coming forward, and they all said the same thing—nothing happened. The flight had gone completely normal, they claimed, cocktails were served by the two flight attendants, they said, the chimes dinged when they could safely move about the cabin, some even dozed, most stayed awake the entire flight, wondering what was going to happen. The airline remained mute and revoked no passes.

  Of course no one believed the passengers and began thinking that this was the new standard statement controlled by the airline. The louder the passengers seemed to want to say, “Nothing happened!” the less people believed them. Ursula had told me, “What do you want from me? I’m not telling you a goddamn thing, neither confirming nor denying. I made an agreement, and I’m sticking to it.”

  “Jesus, Sandeep,” she said one night over the phone, “I can tell you without breaking confidentiality that it was the longest, most horrifying five hours of my life. I was terrified from wheels-up until I had a visual on JFK.”

  Pushing buttons on my phone to make my way through the maze of the DFW phone system, I finally got a pleasant woman who took my name and number and said she was adding me to a “list,” and before I disconnected, she said, “Have a blessed day.”

  A woman at the rooftop party in Phoenix tapped her glass and announced, “Three minutes, please.”

  The spectators stepped out of the shade and into the sunshine, the breeze blowing into our faces.

  I said to Elizabeth, “I called lost and found.” She stood at the railing. Ursula joined us, still with her shredded red cup in her hand as if it could still hold liquid.

  Over the railing, it was a twenty-story drop to the streets below. Yellow lights on security vehicles flashed. “They have my number,” I said to Elizabeth. “I’ll keep calling to check.”

  Ursula leaned forward to see past me to Elizabeth and took this chance to glance at Elizabeth’s cheap white sunglasses. Beneath the plastic lenses, Elizabeth’s eyes focused into the distance at the Sun Resort. Almost everyone else was leaning back, holding their phones out to record the event.

  I adjusted my ears into the wind, and then the Klaxons blared through the deserted street below our party like an animal howling in the empty valley, and then as suddenly, silent white flashes burst in the gutted building ten blocks away and then the sound of popping explosions came to us on the roof. Some first-timers yelped and the thundering rose and deeper concussions thrummed my chest. In the distance, the Sun Resort began to sink into a brown blossom.

  The building seemed to claw at that vapor, like the old lives lived temporarily there, and I couldn’t help but think of Franni from Mount Unpleasant, and a feeling of old lives lived inside one hotel room, and I had a shocking but unrealistic fear that Elizabeth’s violin was in the middle of that building, collapsing, never to be found again.

  Along the street, the windows in the surrounding healthy buildings wobbled but held the orbs of the Arizona sun, and the Sun Resort disappeared and the cloud rose. Oohs and ahs came through the crowd and then everyone began applauding and there were a few hoots. Elizabeth, her hands straight beside her, said, “They’re building a new hotel on that exact same spot.” I waited for it, and she finally said, “What kind of country is this?” and turned and walked away.

  Maybe Franni had been right. Surely a person hits a peak of happiness in his life, the happiest point he or she will ever be. I remembered sleeping on the bunk beds in the attic room in Sopchoppy among dozens of cousins and how safe I felt in a room where the freaky air conditioner blew snowflakes, r
eal snowflakes that fell on the dark blanket before disappearing. Elizabeth would tell me that it was only Americans who expect an ever-increasing graph of happiness until the very end.

  “Let’s split,” I said to Ursula.

  CHAPTER 8

  I touched the keycard to 720’s knob and got the green light, opened the door for Ursula. This hotel room smelled new and wonderful. “If only we could capture this exact scent,” I said to Ursula, who went past me, rolling her pilot’s bag.

  She looked around. “Queen interior, no view. Y’all are always frugal.”

  “Are you calling me cheap?” I said. I loosened my tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons, and pulled the shirt and tie both over my head together.

  “Your mama is worth a fortune and she shops at the Dollar Store for sunglasses.”

  “She doesn’t believe expensive eyewear has a good return value, and what makes you think she’s worth a fortune?”

  Ursula flipped on the bathroom light and looked inside before she let her pilot bag stand, put her shoulder bag on the dresser and unzipped it and pulled out a wad of clothes.

  I checked my phone for messages from DFW while she was in the bathroom changing. In a minute the toilet flushed, and she came out wearing a ragged number 20 jersey and boxer shorts. She put her not-uniform pants and not-uniform shirt neatly on a hanger, sat beside me with her tablet, and noticed the alarm clock on the bedside flashing “12:00.” The hotel was that new.

  “Fuck,” she said and grabbed the clock and began setting the correct time.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  Down to my undershirt and slacks, sock feet, I lifted the hem of her boxers and smiled at the design, a penguin on an iceberg with a palm tree print. “Cute,” I said and then put my palms against my eyes. “I don’t want to think about all the problems I have when I walk out that door,” I said.

  “Don’t be so overdramatic. You’re going to have to find her a new violin.”