Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  “Certainly. It was nice to meet both of you. I’ll see you in the morning. Are you going to Frank’s lecture?”

  “We most certainly will not be,” Elizabeth said.

  The woman looked confused but walked away without glancing back, hugging her ice bucket until she got to a door. Elizabeth and I both held our breaths until she found her keycard, swiped successfully, and disappeared inside her room.

  When the clicking of the door latch finished echoing off floors on the other side of the atrium, I said, “I really hate this hotel.”

  “The sleepwalkers in the Grand Aerodrome aren’t hidden down lonely hallways, are they? This is open and quite dangerous.” She pointed out into the Air of Liability and all the rooms we could see. “She won’t remember any of it in the morning,” Elizabeth said. Her eyebrows of consternation never slept.

  The atmosphere of the open-atrium hotel was dreamlike. Tiny room number lights sat beside each door where guests were sleeping or fucking or everything people do inside a layover, airport hotel.

  “The problem is that everyone in this country is filthy rich and they don’t even know it,” Elizabeth said. “We are all filthy rich and everyone takes prescription medications. We have quite literally turned into a country of Elvis Presleys.”

  My phone dinged.

  “Who could be messaging you in the middle of the night?”

  “Dubourg,” I lied and looked at the message.

  I need you to introduce me to Raye.

  You have to help me.

  “We got our stuff,” I said to her, and left her looking into the Air of Liability and contemplating a country full of Elvis Presleys. I typed and sent:

  I am not in contact with him. If you can do all this why can’t you contact him?

  His introduction to me must be handled gently.

  Who are you?

  I should have a name . . .

  I really like talking to you.

  Do NOT contact me again.

  What you are doing frightens me.

  Don’t be frightened. Do you want to listen to Elvis?

  CHAPTER 13

  I couldn’t sleep, not even with the betta fish swimming in his tank beside my bed. His color was coming back, and he was more greenish than I remembered, but they did this sometimes, this slight change of color brought on by the transition.

  I gave up on sleep and dressed in my swimsuit and robe and went down to the outside pool. It had quit raining and the water was freezing but for some reason it felt good. I floated on my back and tried to focus on a bright star in the sky. My ears were submerged in the dull thrum of water, making the sound of someone on the pool deck calling my name seem angelic, “Mr. Sanghavi . . .”

  The security guard stood by the pool looking down at me, walkie-talkie in hand. “Mr. Sanghavi?”

  “What?”

  “The phone in the lobby is for you,” he said.

  “What phone?”

  “The payphone in the lobby.”

  I hurried to the pool’s stairs. “Who is it?”

  “The operator said a person-to-person for you, Sanghavi. Would you not like me to take these calls?”

  “No, no. Please, always.” I grabbed my robe. I noticed his nametag said ALBERT.

  I left him on the pool deck, took the fire stairs two at a time, loafers slapping concrete. Out in the lobby, I cinched the robe tighter and noticed all the payphone booths were dark except for the one where a receiver sat on the triangle corner table, door open.

  I pushed the door wider and picked it up. “Hello? Hello?” And then the song began, “A little less conversation, a little more action, all this aggravation ain’t satisfaction . . .”

  A message vibrated on my phone.

  It’s always funny.

  And it makes you happy, right?

  Outside, the floodlights above the main desk shined on a front desk agent bowed to her terminal. One of my loafers had come off and now sat abandoned on the carpet, and an older man worked a vacuum, getting closer and closer to it without thinking an abandoned loafer in the middle of the lobby was strange, the vacuum’s tiny headlight touching the shoe and retreating. I listened to the music, trying to think. The old man looked up through the hotel as if to determine where the shoe had dropped from. I responded:

  No.

  Maybe

  Oh

  My mother lost her violin in Dallas on November 9.

  These were simple little words. I knew that the violin wasn’t the same thing as tracking down lost packages, but I was desperate.

  I don’t want to frighten you again.

  You wont

  The phone in my booth rang. I picked it up slowly, expecting Elvis, but there was no drum roll or bass beat, only silence and then a man’s deep voice cut in, “ . . . until five, Monday through Saturday.”

  “Hello?” I said, but it was a recording: “The Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage is officially warehouse 122-Alpha located on the south perimeter.” It stopped and then began again, “Welcome to the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage! The warehouse hours are nine until five, Monday through Saturday . . .”

  Is this a joke?

  What do you believe?

  What do you want from me?

  Only to be introduced to Raye

  I got out of the booth and went and retrieved my shoe.

  There was one early-morning guest checking in at the front desk, and I stepped beside him and said to the agent, “If any of those phones ever ring, please see that someone answers them.”

  “I’m sorry, sir?” the agent, a woman, tried to remain pleasant. “Those are public phones, not hotel phones.”

  “I know that . . . but . . . ” Her nametag said CARLA. “Carla,” I said, “it is of the utmost importance . . . ”

  A voice behind me said, “This is Mr. Sanghavi.” It was Albert the security man, looking like some creepy undertaker in his mustache and his thin neck, hands interlocked in front of him and the ugly nylon jacket with his name sewn on.

  I said to Albert, “I was just saying, any phone calls on the pay-phones are very important to me. Even in the middle of the night, text me. I’ll give you my number.” I got my wallet from the robe’s pocket.

  “I will make sure you get any phone calls. I hope there was no problem,” he said.

  As he watched me shakily find a business card, he said, “Is it true that you had everyone from the Springhill Plaza blackballed?”

  “Blackballed?”

  “Blackballed from the hospitality business.”

  “That’s absurd. Do you honestly really believe that?”

  He seemed to be interested in the wire sculpture on the white marble wall behind the desk. “I’ve worked nights here for twelve years. I heard one person at the Plaza made Ms. Sanghavi angry.”

  “No,” I said, “that’s not true. Why would you believe that? Do you really think we have the kind of power to tell every hotel never to hire someone?”

  “A few hours ago I didn’t believe there was such a thing as the Sanghavis,” he said. “I also heard that you travel with your own staff.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I can assure you we are real, and we have no staff, and we are here to help the Grand Aerodrome and all of its employees and associates.” I finally found a bent card and handed it to him.

  “I have pried. I’m out of line,” he said.

  “Albert, we don’t close everyone down. There are plenty of properties we help become better hotels, and we always educate the staff, which makes the employees more valuable. Please, just let me know if those phones ring. If you answer it and call, I’ll be here immediately. Twenty-four hours.”

  The front desk agent reemerged from the office and held out a package for me and said, “This arrived before I came on duty tonight. I mean, I was told about it but it was late . . . ”

  The return address was “C. Van Raye” with his California address and a sticker signifying it had been forwarded overnight from Dallas.

 
; I remained poised until I got into the rising glass elevator. I tore open the package and pulled out a book. The title was The Universe Is a Pair of Pants, subtitle, A Survival Guide for the Multiverse. At the bottom it said simply, “Van Raye,” the name the world knew him by. The cover was a beautiful image of the unmistakable Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photograph, showing hundreds of galaxies in the darkness of space—elliptical, globular clusters, spiral arms, like a cosmic Pollack splatter in rich colors. But then I realized this famous photograph of the galaxies had been transposed on a pair of black jeans, a woman’s shape filling out the pants. How does he get away with this? The truth was that he had a large female readership. I thumbed through the table of contents to look at the chapter titles to see if anything looked familiar, to see if anything had to do with my life, as if one chapter might be titled “Sandeep, My Son,” but there was nothing like that, only the Durastock letter folded inside.

  Dear Sandeep, my son,

  I’ve just arrived back home. Here is my new book, the best one yet if I’m allowed to say so.

  I have to mention to you the subject we briefly talked about on the phone. I will remind you that this information was given to you in the strictest confidence. (Save this letter for posterity sake.)

  What many others have searched for, I alone have found. It was a matter of knowing how to narrow the search. I will say this again because it has proven fruitful: It was only a matter of looking for places that reminded me of home.

  For people who will wonder about such things, I used an old Craig-48 calculator and performed the loop transformations (like everything else) by hand. This took about three months, between March of last year until June of the same. All my work was done in my house at 211 Gildeer Street, which I should point out has been my personal residence for almost fifteen years, but I, however, first heard the sound when I was alone at the Big Dish antenna above campus.

  Enjoy the book.

  Your loving father,

  Van Raye

  This copy of his book—unsigned—and the letter, had cost me $5,000. There was no mention of the money, and I had no idea what a Craig-48 was. I turned the book over and looked at the author photo. The camera had caught Van Raye, eyes right, and he was in the process of smiling, a smile that you could tell was the beginning of laughter. Of course he displayed no hand in the author photo. Van Raye had written in a previous book that a hand in an author photo was a sign of a bad book. An author with his hand to his chin, or an arm draped on an arm, or, God forbid, holding a pair of glasses, was a sign the writer was dull as shit.

  He was full of shit. I ripped his letter in half before I realized an old man and woman had gotten into the elevator, now staring at me, both with hands on rolling suitcases, ready to start their travel day. I stuffed the pieces of letter in my robe’s pocket and forced a smile.

  They got out at the lobby, and I rose in the glass elevator again, seeing Albert in the lobby below, standing with his hands in front of him, staring at me going up, and I felt my eye twitching.

  That Wednesday, I went to see a doctor in a strip mall.

  CHAPTER 14

  By luck of the draw, I got an Indian doctor. He thumped my chest and instructed me to take deep breaths, which took me to the point of dizziness.

  Dr. Ahuja was in his fifties, hair parted in the middle, stringy bangs and eyes so small they appeared closed and suspicious of everything. He probably had an Indian mother somewhere out there who was either very proud of him for being a doctor, or who thought being only an internist in a strip mall was a big failure.

  When I told him my eye had been twitching, he squinted even harder but said, “No, they aren’t twitching.”

  Redressed and sitting in his office, I stared at the changing pictures in the digital photo frame on his desk. The frame had the swirling logo of the drug company’s name on its bottom. A picture brightened in the screen: a pair of bare feet propped on a table framing the Eiffel Tower. Then the picture changed to bare feet framing Big Ben. I was pretty sure these were Dr. Ahuja’s feet.

  “I think I might be getting depressed again,” I said. There was a superficial scuff on the side of my loafer. “I can’t seem to relax. I don’t think the Rozaline is working. Could I be building up a tolerance?”

  “No,” he said, looking at my records on his computer from dozens of other doctors in my past. I almost expected him to tell me that America was full of overmedicated crybabies, but I’d listened and heard no accent. I’m guessing, like me, he had been born here.

  The digital frame on his desk changed to a picture of his bare feet framing the pyramids, and I tried to control myself from rubbing the mark off my shoe. Scuffed shoes? No appreciation for the value of things.

  “Can you describe in greater detail how you are feeling?” he asked.

  I crossed my leg to bring the shoe closer. “I have this twitching in my eye, like I said—”

  “Stop. It says here you are refusing an influenza shot? I want you to tell me why.”

  “I never get the flu,” I said.

  He made a distrustful sound in his throat and a small laugh, and I used the moment to lick my thumb and wipe the scratch off my shoe.

  The picture frame on his desk changed to his legs propped on a backpack, his bare feet framing sharp snowcapped mountains.

  He asked, “You were how old during this period here . . . when you were last paralyzed?”

  “Last time? Fourteen,” I said, “but I had milder cases at six and eight.”

  “Ventilator?”

  He’d just examined me and seen no scar on my throat, and this mistake made me picture a disappointed Indian mother frowning at him. “No,” I said.

  That episode of paralysis happened after I had visited Van Raye with the Alfa Romeo in the desert. I’d flown back to Elizabeth who was living at a hotel in Baltimore. Tingling began in my extremities. In a matter of hours I had even been unable to talk.

  Dr. Ahuja asked me, “Did anyone ever give a firm diagnosis?”

  “No. It just went away.”

  I remembered how doctors had examined the fourteen-year-old me, trying diagnoses on me like shoes—“He has Guillain-Barré syndrome,” ruling each one out—West Nile virus, MS, mercury poisoning. There seemed some comfort in Elizabeth telling them that it had happened before when I was six, once when I was eight, and it simply had gone away both times.

  Dr. Ahuja’s brow wrinkled, and for the first time I could see his brown eyes, but then he squinted again as the picture changed to his bare feet framing an alpine chateau.

  “I was stressed then too, like I am now. That’s what I’m worried about,” I said. “I haven’t been sick at all since. I mean not even the sniffles. I don’t need a flu shot. I just don’t want to get emotionally unbalanced or I’m worried about the paralysis happening again. The flu shot is unnecessary. My mother says I have an Indian immune system.”

  He said, “That’s absurd.”

  “My biological father is from rural Florida. I’ve got a weird combination of third-world immune systems.”

  He said, “May I see your medical degree?” Idiotically, I touched the pocket of my jacket, but he said, “No, you don’t have one. I do. What you are saying has no scientific facts.” He looked down at his computer and began rapidly typing. “What happened to you has a medical reason, it just hasn’t been found yet. Stay away from superstitions. I would suggest that you let good medical professionals collect the facts and let them give you answers. Calcutta and Miami immune systems have nothing to do with each other.”

  “I didn’t say Miami, I said Florida. There’s a difference.”

  “I know the difference,” he said. “And I would also strongly suggest you take a flu shot.” He asked me, “And you think you are depressed? Describe how you feel.” He squinted into the fluorescent lighting, prepared to analyze my answer.

  How could I explain? I thought about my playlist, “Songs to Beat Depression.”

  “You know how when
you are listening to music?” I said. “Okay, on the shuffle function, it gives you random songs supposedly designed for you by your previous choices, right?”

  “Of course. I know this.”

  “And some days every song the computer sends me makes me feel great, like the best song I’ve ever felt. On other days, it shuffles songs . . .” I shrugged my shoulders. “You know, every song makes you feel terrible, they’re all bummers. Then I realize it’s not the music, it’s me. I only listen to one song, basically. Only one song makes me feel good.”

  “You listen to the same song over and over?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “I just have this feeling everyone is happier than I am. I just want to feel like everyone else.”

  “That’s exactly what everyone else says,” Dr. Ahuja said. He tapped the keyboard to go back over something. He nodded his head. “Okay, okay . . . ” He tilted his chin at me. “Do you have any thoughts of suicide?”

  Suicide? I thought.

  Before I could answer, he held up his hand to stop me. “What was that in your mind?” He admonished me with his hand, “Stop! Free association only. The thing that popped in your mind. Close your eyes.”

  I did. I backed my mind up and saw a cart full of cleaning supplies and I saw housekeeping women pushing the cart. I realized that it had always been the morning staff that found suicides.

  I said to Dr. Ahuja, “Morning maids, hotel morning maids.”

  His chair squeaked. “Interesting,” he said. “What are they mourning?”

  “No, morning maids,” I said, “like housekeeping, like in hotels in the morning, cleaning. I don’t think that will make sense to you—”

  “It makes sense to me,” he said.

  “But morning maids is what I thought about. My mother and I live in an environment where everyone resents us.”