I mumbled, “Call me, dammit,” because I needed proof that Randolph had happened to me, but he wasn’t responding—no ringing, no Elvis songs, the last conversation having disappeared.
Out the big windows on the back of the hotel lobby was the sky over the airport. The storm had left in its wake harsh sunshine that lasted for days as though the great factory of weather was spent of raw material, and there was little proof that there was ever a storm except for tiny patches of snow around telephone poles or in the northern shadows of buildings. That’s the crazy part about the present: there is rarely satisfying proof that anything really happened in the past.
I wanted everyone to believe that Randolph was someone not from this planet who was a great finder of lost things, but no one would come out and say they trusted me, not even Dubourg or Ursula.
What Ruth was doing should have made me feel like she believed in me. She and Elizabeth purchased a small military satellite dish for the twenty-seventh, but instead of feeling good about this my stomach was constantly churning. The setup had cost $5,125. What if this Randolph was some mad professor in some snowbound laboratory who hated Van Raye, some guy with a T3 connection and a ham radio wanting to make Van Raye look like an idiot? The number “27” loomed in my mind.
Sitting in the booth, I caught the eye of the middle-aged bellhop with a beard like Moses. I waved. He didn’t wave back. Honestly, these employees were taking the closing better than any group we’d ever cut loose. Maybe this was because—though I was one of the Sanghavis—I was also Van Raye’s, “the professor’s,” son.
Over the days, Charles’s eye had turned from black to purple, and if he were working on a secret plan, he was anything but incognito in the Grand Aerodrome. He greeted maids in Spanish, talking and laughing with them. He knew every employee’s first name, from engineering to front-desk agents.
While Ruth spent most of her time crawling through access passages, dragging cable or bowed over her computers in the attic, Van Raye barhopped the three hotel bars, his favorite being the Outer Marker on the convention level where he always sat at the corner stool and shouted, “Ron, my favorite mixologist!” Ron would place a handwritten RESERVED sign at Van Raye’s place when he wasn’t there, and Ron would quickly mix a gin and tonic every afternoon while Van Raye scribbled in his black-and-white notebook, the kind he always used, the notebooks mottled like dairy cows. He didn’t look like a man recording history, but rather a man on vacation as hotel employees, people he knew by name, disappeared into unemployment, and eventually Ron the bartender was gone and all the liquor in the Outer Marker inventoried and taken away. Only one bar on the lobby level remained open.
I came out of the phone booth to intercept a Gypsy Sky Cargo man strolling across the lobby with a package under his arm. Of course it was addressed to me, and I signed and took it, expecting it to be the usual heavy hardware, but it was surprisingly light, though lightness, I had learned, didn’t mean inexpensive.
I rode the glass elevator with the light package under my arm, wondering where the concrete of these walls of this hotel would be in a year’s time. Where would the pump to the fake rainforest fountain be? Would it ever be used again, or would it sit out decades in storage or be sent to a landfill? Would birds and dragonflies one day fly through the air that had once been this great hotel, sensing for a second the thousands of old lives that had lived in this space? Would Van Raye be not just science famous, but famous famous?
On the twelfth, I went through the laundry room, which was still perfectly stacked with white towels and linens that might never reach a guest’s hands again. Where would they go? On the far wall, I punched the service elevator’s button and noticed words scratched on the metal plate. Some employee had etched “heaven” over the elevator’s up button, and on the DOWN button scratched “Atlanta.”
The elevator took me to the attic, and the doors opened onto the big, open room, the full size of the hotel’s floor plan and interspersed with load-bearing columns. The old furniture from past years was stored there, and there was my whole family in an oasis of light in the center, five players in The Musical Based on My Life: Elizabeth playing her violin; Ursula sitting sideways in a King Henry chair; Dubourg at a table and gluing what looked like ping-pong balls to clothespins. Van Raye was lying on the couch and reading from his milk-cow notebook held awkwardly above his head. Ruth was at a table burdened with five CPUs stripped of their casings. Sitting in the center of the rug was the $5,125 portable receiver and dish, deployed like a metal daisy.
Dubourg saw the box under my arm, put his glue gun down, and took it from me.
“What is it?” I asked.
He judged the box’s weight and said, “Charles, I think it’s the hats.”
“Hats?” I said. It pissed me off to be in the dark about expenditures.
Elizabeth stood with her violin, and she wore the same clothes she’d had on the day before, her eyes closed as she played Bach.
Charles put his notebook on his chest, put his arm across his eyes. I asked him, like I did every day, “Isn’t there someone else to call, some way to check on the dog?” He was trying to doze now, his lips slightly parted. The days were marked by the metamorphosis of his eye, and I realized looking at the new avocado color, nearly healed, that it reminded me of the Gypsy Cargo logo of the Luna moth’s eye.
“I wouldn’t even know what to ask them,” he said.
The back of Ursula’s King Henry chair was at least five feet high, and she was sideways in the chair reading Flying magazine.
Dubourg, straddling his valise, slit the new package open with his pocketknife and pulled out a stack of baseball hats, white As on the front.
“Atlanta Braves hats?” I said. “I’m not paying for those. Who ordered hats?”
“They are important, actually,” Van Raye said. “It’ll help us in the dark.”
“What dark?” I asked.
“We’re going hiking on the twenty-seventh. At night,” Van Raye said.
“What? Jesus, I’m funding this project, and I demand that I approve everything and be told. Why the hell do we need hats and why are we going hiking?”
Elizabeth played softer and said, “I decided we should go away from the city lights on the twenty-seventh.”
“Why?” I said, “That’s not necessary. This thing can receive from anywhere there’s a clear view of the sky.”
“To see the space station,” Elizabeth said. “It’s for her.” She indicated Ruth. Ruth’s back was to us. She was lost in her four computer monitors.
Dubourg put his baseball cap on, the bill straight, and said, “We all think it might be good for her.”
“Great,” I said, plopping down on the other couch in this living area under the dome of floor lamps and table lamps. “I don’t think we need to make it a big production. We don’t know what will happen. If anything will.”
I held my breath and stared at Ursula’s profile until she told me, “Stop.”
When Elizabeth finished the song and was putting the magic violin in its case, Dubourg set the old Trans-Oceanic radio on a table, stretched out the wire, and clipped the alligator clip to a pipe in the ceiling and began searching the bands.
Ruth swiveled in her chair as if discovering us behind her. Solder smoke hung in the lamp’s light. Her hair had grown longer and was spikey, and her eyes were sleepy. She carefully lowered herself from her chair to the floor, eyes closed before she was totally supine. She grabbed the corner of the old area rug and rolled inside like an enchilada. She only slept two hours at a time. If we didn’t bring meals for her, I don’t think she would have stopped to eat.
I wondered about Ruth’s life, about how we were supposed to take a break and go watch the space station fly over on the twenty-seventh and hope to get the software so Van Raye could send his damn message to the planet.
Only the top of Ruth’s head stuck out of the rolled carpet. Did the baby sleep when she slept? On nights when we forced her to ea
t and go to the pool, she stripped off her robe as usual and dove in. What sensation did a baby conceived in zero gravity have when its mother dove into the pool, a momentary weightlessness during her dive?
Dubourg tuned to a strong music station, a female singer, and turned the volume down.
Sitting in the chair beside Ursula’s, I tried to understand why listening to a faraway broadcast was any better than finding music on the Internet, but it was, something about how these signals broadcasted for someone to listen to at that exact moment. There was this idea in my mind that this song making me so happy would simply evaporate.
I watched Ursula’s leg bounce to the sultry sound of some woman singing in French and the guitar being passionately plucked and then strummed. I leaned and held my phone to the speaker so the app could identify the title, so I would know this song, put it on my “Songs to Beat Depression” playlist, and remember Ursula’s bouncing leg. The French voice was incredible, and I felt myself getting hard without pain. My phone chimed with the song title, but I didn’t look.
I never found out the name of the French singer or the name of the song, and I’ve never heard it again, and I reached out with my hand and put it on Ursula’s thigh until she parted her legs enough for it to slide between them. It was halfway between her knees and all the rest of her. Everyone else was paying attention to what they were doing.
“I want you,” I whispered.
“They came and got me last night,” she whispered back. “You don’t remember anything?”
What I remembered was only that Dubourg and I had ended up falling asleep on the same queen bed, Ursula on the other bed.
“They can get me while I’m here,” she said. She was on the verge of crying.
“Please don’t,” I said.
She slid her hand to mine between her thighs, and I felt the familiar heat of her, and this was a gesture of lovers, people who’d slept together, and as stupid as this sounded, I had to think about if we had slept together, had sex together. Of course not. It seemed the only thing left that we hadn’t done.
At night when Ursula, Dubourg, and I went to our room for the night, we fell asleep like we were kids again, back in the house in Sopchoppy with all the cousins, sleeping wherever we ended up, but combinations and permutations burned my mind in the Grand Aerodrome: three people and two queen beds. There could be three people in one bed and zero people in the other bed, which would be represented DSU+0, or two people in one bed and one in the other (DS+U or DU+S or US+D). When it was DU+S, Ursula and I watched each other across the gap, the undulating reflections of the aquarium’s light on her face, the betta fish fighting his own reflection. When it was US+D, both of us in bed together, Ursula and I touched each other through the night and slept at times with my erection against her. Dubourg in the other bed started the deep breathing that indicated sleep. What did he dream of, his case on the ground beside his bed? He had his hands under his chin, exactly the same way he slept when he was a kid.
In bed without kissing, nothing else, I placed my hand flat on Ursula’s chest, felt her heart beneath her shirt. She took my hand away and guided it beneath the shirt, letting me feel the sound her whole body made, hearing it through my hand.
Her watch always beeped within a minute of her falling asleep, her pressing the button, some last-ditch effort before falling in the wormhole of sleep, and on some nights I woke to the limpness of her paralyzed body next to me, completely consumed by sleep. I whispered her name but I didn’t want to wake her, only comfort her in whatever dream she was having.
CHAPTER 35
With Mr. Blaney, the general manager, we closed the hotel from top to bottom. It took six days. When even Mr. Blaney was gone, Dubourg went with me to lock the front doors. I started to kneel, using my cane for a brace, to put the thick brass key into the lock at the bottom of the revolving doors, but Dubourg took the key and did it.
It would be weeks before auction people came and cleaned the hotel out. I glanced around the dark lobby. Did it really already smell stale? A 1,439-bed hotel for six people? We could let it fall apart around us for the next few days if we wanted to, if Elizabeth could let a hotel decay around her and still keep her sanity.
This empty hotel changed my life. It was devoid of human beings. I took Ursula to the tenth floor, took my plain white master keycard, and I showed her how I could open a room in the middle of the day and how the rooms were still perfect with perfectly made beds. I always threw the metal safety latch across the door as if we needed extra protection from the outside world, and when I was supposed to be arranging for venders to start collecting the contents of the hotel, Ursula and I began discovering the clandestine light that exists in hotel rooms in the middle of the day when you are in bed together. Our clothes littered the floor, Ursula always keeping her black rubber watch on. We tumbled into exotic positions, but always found ourselves quickly back to positions in which we could wrap our arms around each other, that watch of hers pressing into my back. Words were brief because our own voices reminded us of who we were.
Only once did she say, “This isn’t going to last forever.”
I felt her hold her breath. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“We aren’t going to be here much longer. What are we going to do then?”
“We can meet anywhere,” I said, “nothing will change.”
“Something important is happening to me,” she said. “I’m not going to just get over it.”
“Let’s see what happens,” I said.
For a few seconds we watched the steady green light on the fire alarm above the bed. “Do you believe,” I said, “that you reach some point in your life, some peak happiness, a point you’ll never be as happy as you are now?”
“You think this is it?” she asked.
“It can’t be,” I agreed, but just like starting the Movie, listening to the narration and badly hoping that your grandmother doesn’t die again, you still know something has to go wrong or it wouldn’t be a movie. The hotel business teaches you something is always going wrong. Now this hotel was decaying around me, and I was only delaying emptying it out.
CHAPTER 36
The night of the twenty-seventh, the six of us wore our Braves caps and the elevator took us down through the hotel, me looking out of the elevator’s glass and being spooked by the emptiness, the lack of travelers, the darkness broken by only the lowest-wattage security lighting and glowing exit signs as we sunk into the basement.
We looked like a gang in some heist movie all wearing identical hats, Dubourg walking in the parking garage with his black valise in his hand, Ruth with the black laptop case, and Van Raye carrying the nylon bag with the satellite receiver inside. We were on a grand mission to get software to send a message to a distant civilization, but as I walked through the parking deck, I was thinking, What kind of car is Charles driving? Then I saw the old Jaguar.
“A Jaguar?” I asked. “That’s your car?”
He’d always said that a Jaguar was a shitty automobile that people bought only because they were expensive. I think he was actually applying it as a metaphor to a Baltimore private school Elizabeth had enrolled me in at the time.
“We’ll not be comfortable in that,” Elizabeth said and turned on her boot heels to see the plum-colored shuttle van parked along the far wall, its windows stained by time.
Dubourg mapped the Civil War campground on his phone, as Elizabeth drove, the heater in the shuttle on full blast.
“When was the last time I saw you driving?” I said to her, smiling.
The bill of her cap was straight, her hair falling out the back. She kept her eyes on the dark road ahead, hands at eleven and one. “Are you asking me a question? You don’t expect me to remember, do you? It was probably in Nashville.” Even in her insulated coat, she looked small in the seat with the seatbelt rising above her and going into the wall.
“Listen,” I said so only she could hear me, “if nothing happens, it doesn’t necessari
ly mean I’m hallucinating. I don’t have a history of hallucinating.” The others in back watched out the windows, the light from the streets crossing their faces. Ursula had curved the bill of her hat so severely that it shadowed her eyes.
When we left the lights of the city behind, went miles on a single lane and turned off the country highway, we parked at the entrance of a Civil War park, the iron gate flanked by two stone columns.
We abandoned the shuttle at the entrance, stepped over the gate. Van Raye and Ruth stopped, and I realized they were clipping their ping-pong balls to the bills of their caps, the ping-pong balls that Dubourg had glued to the clothespins.
Van Raye said, “Place the ball over your eyes like this. We won’t need lights. No phones please. Think about your night vision.”
“What is this?” I said to Dubourg. He shrugged.
We did as told and began following a trail. It was awkward having the white orb hanging on the bill of my cap. Even with my cane, the terrain twisted at my ankles. It was too dark to see our breaths, but in a minute, the woods and the dirt below the ball became clearer. I saw individual roots and stones, stepped on the wooden erosion steps perpendicular across the trail. The ping-pong ball seemed to emit some kind of glow, but that wasn’t it. The ball kept your focus; out of the sides of my eyes everything was bright. Focus on the ball and everything in your peripheral vision was clear and bright.
“This is amazing, Charles,” Dubourg said.
We went up until the woods gave way to the open space of a field, the stars a brilliant bowl, the Milky Way bisecting it.
“It’s a beautiful night,” Dubourg said. “I thank God for this.”
“Do it in a hurry,” Ruth said. “The station will rise from east-southeast. That direction. We’ve got to set up.”
A meadow was bathed in starlight, scattered with brush. Some kind of primitive fencing zigzagged toward a mountain that blocked out a quarter of the sky, and I smelled a campfire and cooking grease.
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