Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  “Yes, I have found something very, very big.” He let that soak in. “Do you understand?”

  “Okay,” I said. I realized I hated the word “okay,” but “I have found something” in the context of his life wouldn’t be attached to something as mundane as “keys,” “myself,” or “good sushi.” If the economy hadn’t been bad, if we weren’t delivering bad news all the time, I’m not sure I would have been in the state of mind to listen to him. If we were always extremely comfortable, would we ever really be ready for a change?

  CHAPTER 2

  If our world of hotels was mundane and normally happy, my father’s life could be referred to as exciting and, well, a bit tumultuous. He had written popular science books, was the physicist who people would recognize as the tall, strange-looking man from the PBS series, the one who believed he could find an extraterrestrial sound by listening only to planets that he said, “Remind me of home.” I had lived with The Search all my life. The Search was like an imaginary person my father was madly in love with but who posed no real threat because the person didn’t exist. One of the personal items that roamed from hotel to hotel with me was the fifteen-year-old edition of the Sunday Magazine with Van Raye on the cover. He was young enough in that picture to have only thinning hair, and he had his arms folded as he stared down at the camera, his bell-bottom jeans surrounded by a sea of yellow flowers. In the background was the large dish antenna pointed at the sky—the wispy, impossibly blue California sky. The caption read “Searching Alone.”

  If I ever thought he would really find something, I certainly stopped believing long ago, but here he was saying words over the long-distance connection, words I’d heard all my life but meaning had abandoned them—“inhabited,” “exoplanet”—while I watched the scene inside the conference room where Sinclair stood with his knuckles on the table, his envelope crumpled. Elizabeth nodded and listened to their complaints without me.

  “Are you absolutely sure?” I said to Charles. “You’ve found a signal?”

  “Not a signal, but it’s the noise of a planet, jumbled noises of a technically advanced planet.”

  “Sure,” I said and whispered, “Alien . . .” in such a way I didn’t think the phone would pick it up, but he said, “Okay, I don’t like that term.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I tried to wrap my mind around “inhabited,” could only imagine a sparkling city with elevated roadways and flying cars.

  Across the hall, Elizabeth calmly listened to the department heads. This scene was too familiar to me. About now, each person would be listing to Elizabeth his or her job description, naming things they thought no one else could do while the hotel was being staged down, but Elizabeth was reiterating “immediate,” and that the hotel would be operating for a short length of time on a reduced staff before the complete closure.

  I texted Elizabeth on my phone:

  He says he found something

  I saw her take a deep breath and push her phone away so her farsightedness could read it, and she spoke reassuringly to Harrison as she read my message. Then she swiveled in her conference chair and stared at me through the glass walls. I nodded, started a smile, still holding the landline between cheek and shoulder, but then she held up her hands as if to say, “So?” and she turned around to face the managers.

  Van Raye had written the popular science books Perfect Randomness, Renaming the Sky, My Year of Quantum Weirdness, and The Report from Earth. They were popular enough that I occasionally saw a person reading one in the airport, found a tattered copy of The Report from Earth in a beach condo one year. He used to occasionally pop up on a congressional hearing, wearing all black, his white hair styled into disarray to look the part of the mad scientist. His most recent article had been a twenty-five-thousand-word treatise in World magazine about strip clubs. He was an interesting character and people wanted to know what he thought of everything, but he was a gangly man who loved women, had dated a few famous women, been married five times, and he had a difficult reputation among his academic peers, made worse when he dressed shabbily and showed up at parties with attractive, younger women. He lived in a big house on the campus of an important university, had made a fortune three times and gone broke four, lost half of Elizabeth’s net worth before I was the age of five. He was a great storyteller, a brilliant mathematician, but he still drove a late-model sports car to the liquor store to buy Powerball lotto tickets hoping to defy the odds, and he’d been married five times declaring himself in an essay “a habitual monogamist.”

  He said over the phone, “Sandeep, I just need a splash of cash.”

  “Why? Can’t you get money now?” I said.

  “Good God. You’re too sheltered. How do you think the world works? I can’t tell anyone at this point. Do you understand that? I’m trusting you. Did I tell you I was between funding?”

  “Charles, wait, why haven’t you told anyone?” I switched the phone to my other ear. “This is what you’ve been waiting on . . . working on, all these years.” I squeezed the magazine so I could get it out of the wrapper.

  “I’m in immediate need for some short-term funds. Just to get me through.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Charles, I am going to tell the truth. This sounds suspicious. No one at the university knows? There is a protocol. Even I know that.”

  “Suspicious? Jesus, I’m giving you my word here. If you can’t help me I can find someone who can.”

  “No, no. I just said I would send you funds. I’m simply asking if you’re sure it’s not a false positive?”

  “I’m 100 percent sure of its extraterrestrial origin. I’ve already tested the chance of randomness.”

  I tried to see in the conference room if anyone had opened envelopes. I felt horrible for Elizabeth having to do this by herself.

  I pinched the phone on my shoulder and pulled the magazine out, glancing around as if Charles might be watching me, then I straightened it out and saw the cover of this month’s UFO Mysteries magazine showing a formation of World War II bombers and a computer-generated circle around a speck in the old photograph, some bullshit the publishers wanted you to believe was a flying saucer. The caption read “The Real History of the Foo Fighters.”

  I tried to rub the magazine flat on the table. These UFO publications were for crazy people, but I was alone in CUBE 1, trying to listen to my father complaining about how the world has no cash value for knowledge anymore. Van Raye had dispensed with the UFO phenomenon in his essay “The Modern Religion.” I had only started getting the monthly UFO Mysteries magazine because I’d attended a conference at a hotel we were working in just to laugh at the people.

  “Okay,” I said, stopping Van Raye. He’d begged enough. “How much do you need, Charles?”

  “Fifteen hundred should do.”

  “That’s all?” I said. “That’s not a problem.” This would have been a good time to point out to him that Elizabeth and I weren’t made of money, but especially today I wanted him to need us.

  I said to Van Raye, “Why don’t we make it a round two thousand?”

  In the conference room across the hall, Elizabeth scribbled on her pad, something she never did.

  “That would be great,” he said. “This is greatly appreciated. I’ve got the new book coming out.”

  “Why don’t I make it a little more,” I said like it was nothing, and I know it was degrading for him to be strung along like this. What amount would the man say no to? “Why not make it a dollar for every light-year away? How far away is this thing?”

  There was a pause. “Three thousand,” he said.

  “Are you rounding up?”

  “Sandeep, three thousand is wonderful! This book is going to be big.” He said this like he would pay me back.

  “I’ll make it four. Is the new book about this, I mean what you’ve found?” I said.

  “No, no. But I’m going to give you the bank’s routing number, a Bangalore bank’s account number, and my account numbe
r . . . ”

  “Charles,” I said, “this—what you are telling me—it’s true to the best of your knowledge? You aren’t trying to just get money from me? All you have to do is ask.”

  “I’m deeply insulted. Have I ever lied to you before?”

  I thought about it and the answer was actually no. Stretched the truth, exaggerated facts, maybe, but never out and out lied.

  “Can’t you just email me the bank information?” I said. “I’ll send you your cash.”

  “Absolutely. Give me your email address.”

  I had to spell my email out for him though it had been the same since I was eight, and I glanced at Elizabeth, who’d taught me everything I knew about hotels, and I felt a sense of dread, and realized that for the last few minutes, talking to my father, I had forgotten about the business.

  “Geneva 1000x,” someone had written on the pad beside the old phone like we were a thousand times happier in Geneva than we are now.

  “Charles, use the code word Geneva in the email so I will know that’s you and everything is okay.”

  “What a great idea. ‘Geneva.’”

  “Yes, Geneva,” I said.

  There was silence. From thousands of miles away, I could feel his attention waning.

  I turned UFO Mysteries facedown as if from thousands of miles he could see what I was looking at.

  Over the phone, Charles said, “Sandeep, I’ve got to go, someone is waiting on me. I’ll be going on a book tour in the states. Remember, no worries! And I’ll send you an advance copy. How does that sound?”

  “When are you going to release your findings?” I shouted, but it was too late, the line clicked off.

  Still in the conference room listening to the complaining managers, Elizabeth pivoted slowly in her chair to lock eyes on me.

  I replaced the landline on its receiver. She had to understand the magnitude of this, if it were true, far outweighed any business meeting we could ever have, especially the final meeting with managers who we would likely never see again. We should leave this hotel and put the business on hold for a little while, connect with Charles, but how does one connect with Charles?

  I thumbed backward through UFO Mysteries, and then I was trying to comprehend what it would mean if he had found something, and how famous he would be, and I began thinking about his early successful books, and who he was during these periods when he was a guest on talk shows. He was an ass. I remembered the red Alfa Romeo he had the year San Francisco Public Television had produced the six-episode TV series hosted by . . . Van Raye!

  I had just turned fourteen, and, after not seeing or hearing from him in over a year, I forced him to let me come visit California. He met me at the airport, him wearing green sunglasses like a movie star. I came down the long airport hallway into the real world and saw the green lenses were attached to the front of his prescription glasses, and that unruly white hair was a garland around the dome of his head. For someone raised in Florida, he had pale skin that blushed easily, always seemed a shade of splotchy red, especially the bumpy supraorbital ridge down the center of his bald head that looked like the relief map of the Himalayas.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. He squinched his nose and said, “Jesus, look at you,” pulling me along, forcing a smile as he studied me, as if I were not the person he’d expected to get off the plane.

  I thought something was wrong with me, and the first chance I got I excused myself to the airport bathroom to ostensibly wash my face but really to check myself in the mirror to make sure nothing had happened to me on the flight. Why had he given me that look? In the mirror, I appeared normal, dare I say not a bad-looking guy. Look at the pictures of Van Raye—bushy eyebrows, the ugly head, thin lips, stooped posture that so many tall people get—I could not think of his physical appearance without thinking of the word “bones.”

  After checking my face in the bathroom mirror that day, I dried it and went out and continued with his escort, him telling me of his plans, stealing glances at me. It had been over a year since he’d seen me. Elizabeth had been against this trip. “Why do you want to spend time with him?” she had asked. I think Elizabeth believed she’d conceived me by herself, like some plant.

  In the parking garage that day, Charles and I stood over a bright red convertible, top down, a sports car, a man’s car, a cliché that had been illegally parked on the yellow stripes, and he threw a set of keys to me. “You drive!” he said.

  I told him that I was only fourteen and he seemed surprised, but that didn’t stop his plan.

  Van Raye and I spent an hour sputtering and stalling the Alfa Romeo on the top parking deck, him showing me how to give it some gas and let the clutch out, and after a lapse, he asked me if I was ready and pointed to the exit ramp.

  I never told him, but I wasn’t exactly ready. I stalled in front of the woman taking our money for parking. The woman in the booth looked at him as I re-cranked, and she said, “Aren’t you an actor?”

  “No,” he said, “an astronomer.”

  She said, “Oh,” and asked if we needed a receipt. The price was ten dollars to let us out into the world together.

  The gate went up and I made the Alfa go forward, him nudging the steering wheel when we needed to take a certain exit. He pulled a driving hat out from between the seats and wore it backward.

  I was two years away from any legal driver’s license and very uneven with the accelerator. Van Raye glanced behind us as we merged into the interstate, and he judged things just right. “You’re doing fine! Aren’t you having fun? Isn’t this fun?”

  Fourteen and gripping the wheel for the first time in my life, it was all I could do to concentrate and drive through the desert. Back then he worked at a university that had an eleven-mile loop of an underground particle accelerator with the highway built over it that Van Raye used as his personal racetrack. When I hazarded a look, he was rather obnoxiously posed with those green glasses, that hat, his cheeks sucked in so he could hold them between his molars to make dimples. Lining the highway were sterile office buildings crowned with thorny antenna arrays, and the brighter stars and planets came out in the purple sky. Under the ground below us, protons were smashing into protons, like fireworks, and the ends of his hair danced about his hat as if electrified.

  Elizabeth’s knocking on the glass of CUBE 1 brought me out of the daydream, and I realized I was slouched in the chair, head titled back. Behind her, the meeting room was empty, the chairs sitting exactly where disgruntled former employees had abandoned them.

  “I’m sorry,” I said through the glass.

  “If it’s true, he’ll be going through one of those periods,” she said, her voice dulled by the glass. “He’s very hard to manage in popular periods, and he is very unlikeable. Don’t let him affect you.”

  She was right, of course; during high points of his life he never needed Elizabeth or me. If what he said he’d done was true.

  CHAPTER 3

  I got the bellhops to take our twelve boxes to the shuttle and tipped the driver fifty dollars. These were our possessions that traveled the country ahead of us, including my plastic aquarium, five first editions of Van Raye’s books, my childhood copy of Eloise, my clothes, and the photo album that contained my certificates from seminars. I had completed an online degree in finance, but my real education had been in hotel seminars held by foresters, lathers, magicians, amateur radio operators, celestial navigators, and UFO believers. I was even a certified pruner according to the National Ornamental Fruit Growers Association, a seminar I attended out of boredom in Miami’s Grand South Resort when I was a teenager. Elizabeth said only in America can people dream up so many certificates and qualifications.

  Back up in our suite, I sat on the couch and barely got my breath before I heard Elizabeth’s keycard in the door and the electronic lock spinning. She came in, removed her shoes and slid the multitudes of bracelets off her wrists as she walked toward her room, saying nothing to me.

  I thumbed
through the UFO Mysteries before tossing it on the table when my phone vibrated. It was a text from my cousin on Van Raye’s side, Dubourg.

  Where r u? CVG 230-430 tomorow?

  I texted back:

  Dallas. Cant do. I have a meeting in PHX, direct flight.

  Ursula is flyin. Tell her that I miss her when you see her in PHX

  Will not see her. There quick and to Atlanta

  You’ll see her

  Before I could ask him what he meant by seeing cousin Ursula, Elizabeth came out of her room, sari snapping at her ankles, and went to the kitchenette and unscrewed the wine and poured herself a glass, got a container of pasta and came and sat down at the dining room table, opened her laptop, put on her cheap reading glasses, and began tapping out what I knew would be the “Final Report to Shareholders.” Her black violin case sat out of reach at the other end of the table.

  “You don’t care what’s happening? He’s done it,” I said.

  Her fingers continued tapping the report and she said, “Did he say if it has been confirmed?”

  “He said not yet.” I went to the headlines page on my phone and saw only a budget battle in Congress and a color picture of a mass wedding in South Korea, not that I expected there to be headlines that life had been found on another planet. The only sign of Van Raye was an email in my box from an account penjin863@cip.in, which had his bank information.

  While Elizabeth told me that nothing was true until it was confirmed, I thumbed through the email looking for and finding no thank you, no name, but the simple secret code word—“Geneva.” The man hated email and cell phones until he needed money. I logged in to my First America account.

  “But,” she said, “if pressed for an opinion at this point, I believe he thinks he’s done it. Charles is a lot of things, but he wouldn’t lie about his work. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t made a mistake.” She closed the laptop and there was a thin light sandwich for three seconds before the processor went dark.